Hermione could only murmur something inarticulate about, "Very very kind!"
"Only just!" Harvey answered.
Julia bent to kiss the forehead from which all puckers had disappeared, whispering, "I am so glad! oh, so thankful!"
And Harry Fitzalan!
The ten thousand pounds were no bait at all to Harry! He scouted any such considerations. He loved Hermione deeply, but he could not get over that one sight of Hermione in a rage. It "finished him off," he said. No such wife for him!
And though he could not cease to care for her, he held studiously aloof, kept resolutely apart. Perhaps Harry's character was none the worse in the end for this long process of abstention—long, for it lasted four years. Nobody knew what Hermione thought of it. She did suffer, for she did love; but no human being was allowed a glimpse below the surface.
At length, after four whole years, even the sceptical Harry was convinced of that which every one else saw plainly, the real change in Hermione. He found that she was now what once she had only, at least in a measure, seemed to be.
Then he proposed, and was accepted.
THE END.
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