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Rh you, just to my pride, for that's what it comes to. If I were to accept you now, to-night, it would be for always, and because I meant to try and make you as good a wife as it is possible for me to be."

"Will you have me, then, Elsie?"

"Frank, you don't want to marry a girl who has just told you that she cares for a man who—who would not marry her and has let her see that he despises her."

"Yes, I do want to marry that girl. It is nothing to me what any other man feels about her."

"But it should be something to you— what she feels about some other man."

There was a short silence. At last Frank spoke. "I am willing to take my chance of your being cured of that. I have been watching you. Perhaps you thought I was too dense to see or to understand. But love makes people quick at forming conclusions. I formed mine about you and Blake. I thought he didn't care for you in the way that a man cares when he means to marry a girl in spite of every obstacle—I can't help feeling about Blake that there is some obstacle—some mystery in his past."

"Ah! You feel that, too?"

"Yes. It may be nothing disgraceful; I don't know. Why should I think so? The man is a gentleman. I like him in a kind of way, though he is my rival. But when a man loves a woman beyond all things, he goes away or else he does his honest best to win her. He doesn't play at a game of flirtation to amuse himself and gratify his sense of power, and let her run the risk of being hurt in it, as you have been hurt, my poor Elsie."

"Don't speak of that. I will cure myself. I will not let myself be beaten."

"It's because you say that that I am safe in taking the risk. I know you, Elsie; how true and good and pure you are in the very depths of your nature! You have only been playing at life, and at love. You haven't known anything of evil, or of the realities of the world. It may be that only in marriage you will learn what love means—and oh, if it