It had been a day full of quiet happiness for both of them, and a feeling of vague regret, of languid sorrow, fell over them, as they stood in silence, looking on the beauty of river and foot-hill and mountain bathed in autumnal silence and gold.
"Oh, if we never grew old!" Cordelia said, with a wistful little shake of the head, drawing closer to Hartley, and slipping her hand through his arm.
He looked down at her with a strange sternness that was not all sternness in his eyes. She turned away, gazing across the wide stretch of river dotted with its shifting opals and pearls.
"Cordelia," he said, softly.
She did not answer. Her musing eyes were far away, on a drifting bank of gray cloud that was slowly shrouding the glory of the sunset and bringing with it a breath of colder wind.
"Cordelia," he repeated, even more softly, "will you marry me?"
She fell back from him, startled, amazed. It came as a bolt out of the blue.
It was the one thing she had not looked for, had not hoped for, had never thought to ask for.
"Marry you!" she repeated, as though the words were words she did not know. "Marry you!"
The molten silver of the river so far beneath her seemed to rise and fall and fade, and the purple line of the foot-hills wavered and darkened and went out. A new voice had come to her in the wilderness of her doubt, a new path seemed to lead out of the two-fold desert of her despair.