‘I have not been always what I ought to have been,’ he said, ‘you must understand that, Grace. I can’t let you take me without telling you, though it’s against myself. I have not been the man that your husband ought to be, that is the truth.’

She smiled upon him with all the tenderness of which her eyes were capable, which was saying much, and pressed the hands which held hers. They had just, after many difficulties and embarrassments and delay, said to each other all that people say when, from being strangers, they become one and conclude to part no more. They were standing together in all the joyful agitation and excitement which accompany this explanation—their hearts beating high, their faces illuminated by the radiance of the delight which is always a surprise to the true lover, even when to others it has been most certain and evident. Their friends had known for weeks that this was what it was coming to; but he was pale with the ineffable discovery that she loved him, and she all-enveloped in the very bloom of a blush for pure wonder of this extraordinary certainty that he loved her. She looked at him and smiled, their clasped hands changing their action for the moment, she pressing his in token of utmost confidence as his hitherto had pressed hers.

‘I do not mean only that I do not deserve you, which is what any man would say,’ he resumed, after the unspoken yet unmistakable answer she had made him. ‘The best man on earth might say so, and speak the truth. No man is good enough for such as you; but I mean more than that.’

‘You mean flattery,’ she said, ‘which I would not listen to for a moment if it were not sweeter to listen to than anything else in the world. You don’t suppose I believe that; but so long as you do—’

Her hands unloosed and melted into his again, and he resumed the pressure which became almost painful, so close it was and earnest.

‘Dear,’ he said, with his voice trembling, ‘you must not think I mean that only. That would be so were I a better man. I mean that I am not worthy to touch your dear hand or the hem of your garment. Oh, listen: I have not been a good man, Grace.’

She released one of her hands and put it up softly and touched his lips.

‘All that has been is done with,’ she said, ‘for both of us—everything has become new—’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘if you are content with that, it is so; it shall ever be so. Yet I would not accept that peace of God without telling you—without letting you know—’

‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘or I might have to confess, too.’

‘You,’ he cried, seizing her in his arms with a kind of rage. ‘Oh, never name yourself in such a comparison. You don’t know, you can’t imagine—’

Once more she stopped his mouth.

‘No more, no more; we are both content in what is, and happy in what is to come.’

‘Happy is too mild a word. It is not big enough, nor strong enough for me.’

She smiled with the woman’s soft superiority to the man’s rapture that makes her glad. Superiority yet inferiority, admiring, yet half disdaining, the tide that carries him away—all for her, as if she was worth that! proud of him for the warmth of passion of which she is not capable, at which she shakes her head, not even he able to transport her to such a height of emotion as that to which she, only she, no other! can transport him. She began to be his critic and counsellor on the moment, as soon as it had been acknowledged that she was his love, and was to be his wife.

It had been a long wooing, much interrupted, supposed to be hopeless. They had loved each other as boy and girl seven or eight years before. It is to be hoped that no one will be wounded by the fact that Grace Goodheart was twenty-five; not an innocent angel of eighteen, but a woman who had her own opinions of the world. He was five years older. When she was seventeen and he twenty-two there had been passages between them which he had perhaps forgotten: but she had never forgot. At that period they were both poor. She an orphan girl in the house of her uncle, who was very kind to her, but announced everywhere that he did not intend to leave her his fortune; he a young man without any very definite intentions in life, or energy to make a way for himself. They had parted then without anything said, for Oliver was a gentleman, and would not spoil the future of the girl whom he could not ask to marry him. He had gone away into the world, and he had forgotten Grace. But there is nothing that a girl’s mind is more apt to fix upon than the vague conclusion, which is no end, of such an episode. There is in it something more delicate than an engagement which holds the imagination as fast as any betrothal. He has not spoken, she thinks, for honour’s sake. He has gone away, like a true knight, to gain fame or fortune, and so win her: and she is consciously waiting for him for long years, perhaps, till he comes back, following him with her heart, with her eyes as far as she can, ever open to all that is heard of him, collecting diligently every scrap of information. Grace had not been without her little successes in that time; others had seen that she was sweet as well as Oliver Wentworth; but she was so light-hearted and cheerful that no one could say it was for Oliver’s sake, or for any reason but because she did not choose, that she would have no one in her own sphere. And then came that strange reversal of everything when the old uncle died without any will, and Grace, who it was always supposed must go out governessing at his death, was found to be his heiress. She was his next of kin; there was nobody even to divide it with, to fight for a share; and instead of being a little dependent orphan, she was an heiress and a very good match. How it was that Oliver Wentworth came back after this, was a question that many people asked; but however it was, it was not with any mercenary thought on his part. Whether his sister was equally disinterested, who would take no denial, but insisted on his visit, need not, perhaps, be inquired. He had come rather against his will, knowing no reason why Trix should be so urgent; and then he had met Grace Goodheart, whom he had not seen for so many years, again. To her it was a little disappointing that he came back very much as he had gone away, without having achieved either honour or fortune. But success is not dealt out in the same measure to every man; and if he had failed, how much more reason for consoling him? He had only failed in degree. He had not won either honour or fortune; but he was able to earn his daily bread, and perhaps hers. And when he saw her again, his heart had gone back with a bound to his first love, although in the meantime that love had been forgotten. She was aware, more or less, of all this. She was even aware, more or less, of what he had wanted to tell her. She had followed him too closely with her heart not to know that he had not always kept himself unspotted from the world. This had cost her many a secret tear in the years which were past, but had not altered her mind towards him. There are women who can cease to love when they discover that a man is unworthy; indeed, it is one of the commonplaces both of fact and fiction, that love cannot exist without respect. It would be very well for the good people, and very ill for those who are not good, if this were always so. There are many, many, of women, perhaps the majority, who are not so high-minded, and who love those they love—God help them—whether they are worthy of love or not. Grace was one of those women. She heard, somehow—who can tell how, being intent to hear anything she could pick up about him—that he had not kept the perfect way. She heard that he had gone wrong, and perhaps heard no more for a year or two, and in her secret retirement wept and prayed, but made no outward sign; and then had heard some comforting news, and then again had been plunged into the anguish of those who know that their beloved are in misery and trouble, yet cannot lift a finger to help them. When he appeared again within her ken, she knew it was a man soiled with much contact of the world that met her, and not the pure-hearted boy of old. But he was still Oliver Wentworth, and that was everything. And when in honour and honesty he would have told her how unworthy he was, her heart leapt up towards him in that glory and delight of approbation which is perhaps the highest ecstacy of a woman. His confession, which she would not allow him to make, was virtue and excellence to her. She was more proud of him because he wanted to tell her that he was a sinner, and acknowledge his unworthiness, than if he had been the most unsullied and excellent of men.

Wentworth’s sister had always been Grace’s friend. She was older than either of them, married, and full in the current of her own life. When Oliver came back to her after all was settled, and made what he believed was a revelation to her of his love and happiness, Mrs. Ford laughed in his face, even while she shared his raptures.

‘Do you think I don’t know all that?’ she said. ‘There never was anything so stupid as a man in love. Why, I have known it for the last eight years, and always looked forward to this day.’ Which, perhaps, was not quite true, and yet was true in a way. For Trix had all along loved Grace for loving her brother, and had seen that, with such a wife, Oliver would be all that could be desired; yet had thought it best policy, on the whole, till Grace came into her fortune, to keep them out of each other’s way.

‘Trix,’ he said very gravely, pulling his moustache, ‘for eight years she has always been the first woman in the world for me.’

At which his sister, which was very unbecoming, continued to laugh. ‘The first, perhaps, dear Noll,’ she said, ‘but we can’t deny, can we, that there have been a few others—secondary? But you may be sure, so far as I am concerned, Grace shall never know a word of that.’

Oliver did not take the matter so lightly. From his rapture of content he dropped into great gravity and walked about the room pulling at his moustache, which was a custom he had when he was thinking. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘I should have liked her to know before she took the last step that—that I haven’t been a good fellow, Trix.’

‘Oliver, I shouldn’t like to hear any one else say so. Tom says’ (this was her husband) ‘that you’ve always been a good fellow in spite of—’

‘In spite of what?’

‘Well, in spite of—little indiscretions,’ said Trix, looking her brother in the face, though she coloured as she did so in spite of herself.

‘That means—’ he said, and walked up and down and pulled his moustache more and more. It was a long time before he added, ‘There is nothing that makes a man feel so ashamed of himself, Trix, as to feel that a woman like Grace—if there is anyone like her—’

‘Oh, nobody, of course!’ said his sister.

He gave her a look, half angry, half tender. ‘You are a good woman, too; and to think that two girls like you should take a fellow at your own estimate, and pretend to think that he is a good fellow enough after all: as if that were all that her—her husband ought to be.’

‘Well, Noll,’ said Mrs. Ford, ‘it is better not to go into details. Very likely we should not understand them if you did, though I am no girl, nor is she a baby either, for the matter of that; but whatever you have been or done, the fact is that you are just Oliver Wentworth, when all is said: and as Oliver Wentworth is the man Grace has been fond of almost since she was a child, and who has been my brother since ever he was born—’

‘Strange!’ he cried, with a curious outburst, half laugh, half groan, ‘to think she should have kept thinking of me all this time, while I—’

‘Have been in love with her, and considered her all the time the first woman in the world. You told me so just now.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s not a lie, though you may think it so. I did feel that when I thought of—’ and here he paused and gave his sister a guilty look.

‘When you thought of her at all; you needn’t be ashamed, Noll. That’s the man’s way of putting it. We women all know that; but now that she is before your eyes and you cannot help thinking of her—now it has come all right.’

Trix too gave a laugh which was half crying; and then she dried her eyes and came solemnly up to him with a very serious face, and caught him by the arm and looked into his eyes.

‘Oliver, now that all that’s over, and you’re an older man and understand that life can’t go on so; and now that you are going to marry Grace, the woman you have always loved—Oliver, for the love of God, no more of it now.’

He gazed at her for a moment with a flash of something like fury in his eyes, and then flung her arm far from him with fierce indignation. ‘Do you think I am a brute beast without understanding?’ he cried.