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268 "Tell me that he wishes to marry you—and that you wish to marry him, and you are free from this moment."

"I can't tell you that. He doesn't want to marry me."

"And yet he hangs on about you—he looks at you as I saw him look to-night, he plays with you, he makes you untrue to yourself—and to me!"

"Don't say that—don't, don't. I don't understand him. I shall never understand him. There is some mystery—I don't know what. Perhaps he doesn't really love me—no, I am sure he cannot really love me"—poor Elsie cried out of her tortured soul. "Perhaps he is married already— there has been such a thing even out of books. One thing is certain, he does not want to marry me, and he is going away, Frank; he will trouble us no more."

"Trouble us! Then you wish our engagement to go on?"

"It must be as you like. I'm not worth loving. And yet, oh Frank, if you leave me I shall be desolate indeed."

"I shall never leave you unless you send me away. You know what I said to you, Elsie, when you agreed to become my wife. I said that it might be an engagement before the world till such time as you could make up your mind whether you loved me well enough to marry me, and I said that if you decided that could not be, I would never blame you. I meant that then—every word, and I mean it now, and I had no right to say what I did to you a moment ago about ending it at once. But a man may be tried beyond his true self, and that's, how it was to-night. I'm not a fellow who has nerves in a general way, but somehow my nerves seem on edge to-night. I shall not ask you another syllable about Blake. I will wait patiently."

"Oh, Frank, you are very generous!"

"Am I? You said that to me, I remember, that night—after the Government House ball. I thought then only of protecting you against the world, Elsie, and against what people might say, and the need passed. And now it seems to me there's even a greater need; but it's the need to protect you not against others so much as against yourself."