When at last they reached the street he said,-- 'I could not speak to you in a room. A room is quiet too and lonely now. I feel lonely in my mind, and I like to see thousands of people round me. It diminishes my own importance in my own eyes, and I want to put myself wholly out of sight if I can.' The hazel-grey eyes were lifted to his in curiosity and trouble. What was it he could not say to her in a room and could in a crowded street? Something unpleasant. What could it be? His eyes were fixed before him. He did not look at her. She simply said, 'Yes,' softly. 'On a country road, or in a wood I could say to you what I have in my mind, or in our own quiet house at home. But in that boarding-house I could not, Marie. On a country road, or among trees, or in our home there would be a solemn background of nature or of associations, and these would take my mind off, Marie, your beauty and my great love of you. I should there understand you and I were then taking only a part in a vast concert in which thousands sang. I should be able to keep my mind off the overwhelming importance to me of your personality, by having forced upon me greater facts than our association. These busy streets act on me like the wood or open fields or the house to which my mother came as bride, in which she mourned as widow.' He was talking more to himself than to her. He was accounting to himself rather than explaining to her why he preferred the streets to the house. She was looking up timidly at him. This was to her unintelligible. She knew he had some reason for wishing to speak to her out of doors. That was all she wanted to know. That was quite enough for her. What could this great long introduction mean? What was he going to say? He had kissed her, and looked at her very affectionately that morning, but his manner was strange. He went on,-- 'But in that house we have left all is vulgar and commonplace but your presence, and when we are alone I can think of nothing but your great beauty and my great love for you.' She pressed his arm very softly, looked up at him with eyes of timid mirth. 'Why should you wish to forget, love?' He knit his brows, and looked down at her with eyes that did not see. 'Because I had a dream last night.' 'But surely you put no faith in dreams?' 'No. But I put no faith in omens either. Yet, if I see an angry sky, I prepare for bad weather.' 'Bad weather often, generally, follows angry skies, but nothing follows dreams.' He looked down at her again for a moment with abstracted eyes. 'You are quite right. I employed a bad figure; I will try to find a better one. If I am driving a coach along a road, and I see another coach overturned by reckless driving, I am likely to be more careful for awhile, although there may be nothing more than coincidence in my seeing the drag overturned. So my dreaming last night that I had lost you may make me more careful not to lose you, although there is nothing more than coincidence between the facts of yesterday and my dream.' She pressed his arm slightly, and bowed her head. 'This is the love I dreamed of,' she thought. 'This is the love that will not change; for it is the love that first thinks of the loved one, and then of the love, and last of itself. This is the royal self-disdaining love. My George! My love!' She said aloud, 'May I hear what the dream was?' 'It was a kind of allegory, and was connected with one of my waking dreams. This fact alone would make it remarkable, for not one time in fifty thousand do we dream in sleep what we dream awake. I need not trouble you with my waking dream; I will tell you that at another time. In sleep this morning (I lay down for an hour or so after dawn) I saw the sea--' 'You have never really seen the sea?' 'No, but I know something of it.' 'I have seen much of it.' 'Then you shall tell me of it in our evenings by the fire by-and-by.' She pressed his arm, and looked up softly into his face. His eyes were fixed before him, and he did not look down. 'And in your dream?' 'I saw a boat come into this sea. I was in this boat, steering it. A bundle of furs lay at my feet. For days and nights I steered that boat until it entered the Thames. I knew someone--a woman--lay under these furs. I knew she was a stranger, a savage woman--' 'How fond you are of this place,' she said, interrupting him. He threw his eyes up, and surveyed, with eager admiration the august pile rising up to heaven. 'I have always loved the place,' he said, 'even before I saw it.' He withdrew his glance from aloft and cast it once more before him. Her eyes were fixed on him wistfully as she asked,-- 'And since you have seen it?' 'I have loved it all the more.' His eyes were still speculative and busy with some scene not present to his bodily eye. 'It was here,' she whispered, 'that I first saw how good and how noble you are--here, just where we are now, under St Paul's.' He looked down at that beautiful young face with that wistful expression upon it. For a moment his face softened; he bent a little over her. Then he lifted his eyes once more, and resumed speaking in the same voice he had used before--a dull, monotonous voice, under which ran an undercurrent of uneasiness. 'Ah! Is it so? I did not know that.' A vague shadow of disappointment came over her face. He might take a little interest in that fact, no matter what other things were in his mind. He went on,-- 'I knew she was a strange savage woman, and I knew why I brought her to England. The reason was ridiculous, but it satisfied, as ridiculous reasons satisfy in dreams.' She had a much lessened interest in the story of that dream now. That dream had come between him and her, and had made him indifferent to the place at which her heart had first felt moved towards him. He still kept on,-- 'In a while we drew near London. I knew I had to land my passenger as near this spot as possible. I steered the boat to the wharf down there. The husband of the woman stood upon the wharf. I called to him to come for his wife; he came and carried away the woman. Then I pushed off my boat.' He paused, and, looking at the northern entrance of the cathedral, said,-- 'Shall we go in?' 'Yes, if you wish it,' she answered listlessly. As they entered the vestibule he said,-- 'In getting away from the wharf I lost my paddle. I had now no power to guide the boat, no power to regain the wharf. I cried to the man for help.' Here they entered the body of the cathedral. 'When I looked, the cloak and hat which the man had worn had fallen away, and the furs from the figure of his wife--' 'The service is going on, George; do you wish to take part in it?' she said. She thought, 'This dream is very long, and he is so wrapped up in it he does not remember this is service-time; he cannot even see that the service is going on.' 'The figure of the man was now a fleshless skeleton, and the woman in the arms of the skeleton was you!' She started from his side, with an exclamation of terror she could not suppress. 'So I have come here to-day during service, to thank God that it was only a dream, and to pray that no evil may ever come to my Marie through my fault, and that her faith may be permanently confirmed. Marie, of course the dream has no more to do with you and me than with Kate or Mr Nevill; but it will do neither of us harm to thank God my dream was but a dream; to pray I may never do you harm, and to ask that you may be continued in your pious resolves.' 'There is only need for us to pray for the last,' she said, clinging to his arm with redoubled tenderness. All had been explained--more than explained. All had been not only justified, but swept away; and, in place of the cold sensation caused by his peculiar manner of that morning, now glowed a love warmed for the first time by gratitude. They moved into the cathedral and sat down. He bent over her and whispered,-- 'That dream did not affect me as you might think. It did not chill me or make me uneasy because of any dread I had I should lose you in an ordinary way. My notion of life here and life hereafter is that we are sent here to learn to love one another, and then we go to a better place to enjoy the love we have acquired here. Now, Marie, what horrified me in that dream is that it seemed to me a kind of allegory. The sea-voyage which I had with you when I did not know you, was our life on earth. When our earthly life had run, when our voyage was finished, we were separated, and I saw you in terrible company, and was powerless to rescue you. You were in the arms of Death, at the gateway of the great city of the Dead. This suggested to me that, though you and I might go through time together, we might be separated in eternity.' She turned her face to his, and asked gravely, sadly,-- 'Why should we be separated in eternity? What could separate us?' 'Marie, I am no bigot. I do not say that any man will be lost because of his faith, so long as he has faith of some kind. But I believe that when we die we shall be classed together in the order of our faith. You have been long indifferent. Suppose you should grow indifferent again. Suppose you should be indifferent at the last. Suppose I should die ten years hence, and you should survive me ten, twenty years; and at the end of those twenty years have lost all faith, or have married again and adopted a new one, you would be lost to me.' 'George, how can you say such cruel things? You should not say such things. You know I should not marry.' 'Let us not talk like children, Marie. No one knows that. I am sure that if you marry me now, you and I will be for ever together in the hereafter. We do not know everything. We are not told that; but I believe, when a man and woman marry for love, they are husband and wife for ever. Now you see, child, why I am so anxious.' 'Yes,' she murmured, looking up at him half-frightened. He was putting things in a terribly earnest way. She had often thought of love and marriage before--who is it does not think of these things?--but she had never thought of them so surrounded by awe before. Most people treated love with levity, and marriage as a matter of legal contract, to be embodied in documents and secured by stamps. Now this man whom she had agreed to accept as a husband was taking precautions, not only for their earthly happiness, but for their eternal union also. He had often seemed great and noble to her, but he had never overawed her before. She looked up at him with wonder and devotion, mingled with grave concern. He went on, still in the low voice he had first employed, and with his lips close to her ear,-- 'I thought, Marie, that as under these walls we had our first serious conversation, as under these walls you had first been guided from trivial things by my hand, there could be no place better for a talk of this importance, and asking you to do the first favour I request of you.' She was profoundly moved. She had wronged him. She had thought him indifferent to her to-day, and all the time he had been taking the most elaborate care of her, had been expending the finest portion of his intellect, and the deepest fountains of his love on her. She looked upon him with gratitude that was a kind of worship, and said,-- 'I will promise you beforehand. I will promise now to do in my life all you may ask me.' 'No,' he said. 'That would not be a wise or a just promise.' 'I will promise, then, beforehand.' 'No; there is no reason for that. That would be unfair. Besides, there is no reason why you should not know what I want you to promise. It is this, "I promise God never to be again indifferent to religious matters; to adhere to the faith of the Church in which I was born, the faith of the Church in which I now kneel, and to marry no man who does not belong to the faith of this Church, and take an active part in its worship."' She repeated the words slowly and distinctly. When she had finished, she looked up at him with eyes full of happy tears, and said,-- 'It would be a great sin to break that promise, George?' 'It would. A great sin.' 'That promise is as binding in your eyes as the marriage ceremony?' 'Quite as binding in my eyes as the marriage ceremony.' 'Oh, thank you for having asked me to make it, and to make it here. I feel now as if some great dread or weight had fallen off me.' 'But, Marie, you have accepted a grave responsibility.' 'How?' she asked, looking up at him incredulously. 'You have promised to be a practical Christian of the Church of England all your life.' 'That will not be very hard; and you will help me all my life.' 'But if I die you must not marry any man of any other faith.' 'I shall marry one man, and one only, and that is you. I will add that to the promise.' 'No, no. Such a promise would be wrong. You have done all I ask.' 'Will you do all I ask now, George?' 'What is it?' 'Believe that all the love woman has to give to man I give to you, and that I am more grateful to you for the trust you have shown in me to-day than for all the other things you will ever do for me.' 'Trust! What trust, my love, my child?' He looked at her with a puzzled, perplexed expression. 'When, although you do not know me a month, you take my word that I will not do a certain thing, even if I live twenty years after you die.' He looked at her in amazement. 'Break your promise to me, love! How could you? What would be the value in my mind of vows at the altar if I thought you would not keep a solemn promise like that? The woman who would, after my explanation, break a promise such as that, would care little how she broke any vows or oaths.' She looked up at him with some of her old archness. 'I know whom all this is aimed at!' 'Whom?' 'The only man I know who doesn't believe anything is Mr Nevill; and you know he and I were great friends once.' Osborne shook his head gravely. 'I should not like you to marry a man such as he.' 'George, George, the service is over, and we have not minded it.' 'The service has not yet begun.' 'Begun! The people are all going away.' 'Wait a moment, and you will see I am right.' When the people had cleared off, and they were almost alone in the portion of the church where they sat, he said,-- 'Let us kneel hand-in-hand for a betrothal.' She took off her glove. He knelt at her left side and took her hand. He let go her hand in a moment. A vivid blush darted over her face, and they both rose. As she did so, upon the third finger of her left hand flashed five rubies she had never seen before.