‘I am sure it is!’ she repeated fervently. ‘O Philip, there never was a time I did not love you: and since that day on Ashen Down, I have loved you with my whole heart. I am sometimes afraid it has left no proper room for the rest, when I find how much more I think of your going away than of poor Charles.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you have understood me as none but you would have done, through coldness and reserve, apparently, even towards yourself, and when to others I have seemed grave and severe beyond my years. You have never doubted, you have recognized the warmth within; you have trusted your happiness to me, and it shall be safe in my keeping, for, Laura, it is all mine.’
‘There is only one thing,’ said Laura, timidly; ‘would it not be better if mamma knew?’
‘Laura, I have considered that, but remember you are not bound; I have never asked you to bind yourself. You might marry to-morrow, and I should have no right to complain. There is nothing to prevent you.’
She exclaimed, as if with pain.
‘True,’ he answered; ‘you could not, and that certainty suffices me. I ask no more without your parents’ consent; but it would be giving them and you useless distress and perplexity to ask it now. They would object to my poverty, and we should gain nothing; for I would never be so selfish as to wish to expose you to such a life as that of the wife of a poor officer; and an open engagement could not add to our confidence in each other. We must be content to wait for my promotion. By that time’—he smiled gravely—‘our attachment will have lasted so many years as to give it a claim to respect.’
‘It is no new thing.’
‘No newer than our lives; but remember, my Laura, that you are but twenty.’
‘You have made me feel much older,’ sighed Laura, ‘not that I would be a thoughtless child again. That cannot last long, not even for poor little Amy’
‘No one would wish to part with the deeper feelings of elder years to regain the carelessness of childhood, even to be exempted from the suffering that has brought them.’