'I have always loved you; but we are too young, yes, that is it, we are too young--too much of an age. If I marry, I must look up to my husband. Indeed, indeed, we are too young, Richard!'
'I am, you mean;' how calm he was growing; why his very voice was under his control now. 'Listen to me, dear: I am only six months older than you, but in a love like mine age does not count; it is no boyish lover you are dismissing, Ethel; I am older in everything than you; I should not be afraid to take care of you.'
No, he was not afraid; as she looked up into that handsome resolute face, and read there the earnestness of his words, Ethel's eyes dropped before that clear, dominant glance as they had never done before. It was she that was afraid now--afraid of this young lover, so grave, so strong, so self-controlled; this was not her old favourite, this new, quiet-spoken Richard. She would fain have kept them both, but it must not be.
'May I speak to your father?' he pleaded. 'At least you will be frank with me; I have little to offer, I know--a hard-working curate's home, and that not yet.'
'Hush! I will not have this from you,' and for a moment Ethel's true woman's soul gleamed in her eyes; 'if you were penniless it would make no difference; I would give up anything, everything for the man I loved. For shame, Richard, when you know I loathe the very name of riches.'
'Yes, I know your great soul, Ethel; it is this that I love even more than your beauty, and I must not tell you what I think of that; it is not because I am poor and unambitious that you refuse me?'
'No, no,' she returned hurriedly; 'you know it is not.'
'Then I will not despair,' and as he spoke there rushed upon him a sudden conviction, from whence he knew not, that one day this girl whom he was wooing so earnestly, and who was silencing him with such brief sweet replies, should one day be his wife; that the beauty, and the great soul, and the sad yearning heart should be his and no other's; that one day--a long distant day, perhaps--he should win her for his own.
And with the conviction, as he told Mildred long afterwards, there came a settled calm, and a wonderful strength that he never felt before; the world, his own world, seemed flooded over with this great purpose and love of his; and as he stood there before her, almost stooping over, and yet not touching her, there came a vivid brightness into his eyes that scared Ethel.