"I am not afraid of your smiling, but I cannot give my reasons. That I consider them good must answer for us both."
"Very well, then, we will let them answer. You need not take the walk I ask, but give me instead another pleasure—your promise to be my wife."
"Your wife?"
"Yes, Hermione."
"With such a secret between us?"
"It will not be a secret long."
"Mr. Etheridge," she cried with emotion, "you do not know the woman you thus honor. If it had been Emma——"
"It is you I love."
"It would have been safe," she went on as if she had not heard him. "She is lovely, and amiable, and constant, and in her memory there is no dark scar as there is in mine, a scar deeper than this," she said, laying her finger on her cheek, "and fully as ineffaceable."
"Some day you will take me into your confidence," he averred, "and then that scar will gradually disappear."