The colour flooded into his face, and going up to her he took her hand, which was all she would yield him, and, holding it to his lips, said in her ear every soothing tender word that love's tutoring could bring to mind.

In his emotion he told himself and her that he admired and loved her the more for the incident downstairs, for the temper she had shown! She alone among them all had had the courage to strike the true stern Christian note.

As to the annoyance such courage might bring upon him and her in the future--even as to the trouble it might cause his own dear folk--what real matter?
In these things she should lead.
What could love have asked better than such a moment?
Yet Marcella's weeping was in truth the weeping of despair.

This man's very sweetness to her, his very assumption of the right to comfort and approve her, roused in her a desperate stifled sense of bonds that should never have been made, and that now could not be broken.

It was all plain to her at last.