"I don't believe that yet awhile."
"When I came home to-night, I had no other hope than that you and your father would consider that I had not made good my claim to become a favoured suitor, and that there was nothing left me but to make my statement and withdraw my rash pretensions. You will pardon me, Harriet, but it had never struck me that you were strong enough, or—pardon me again—that you had ever loved me well enough to attempt a sacrifice.
"I was a girl—very vain and frivolous—you were right."
"I come back and find you altered very much, Harriet. I find the old reserve that piqued my pride no longer there, and, instead, a something newer and more frank, a something that says, 'Trust me.' Is that a true reading?"
"Yes," she murmured.
"I am vain enough to believe in the heart growing fonder during my absence—though I have always fancied the experiment full of danger for the absent one. Say that the heart has done so—or that I did not understand you. Still the effect was the same, or I should not have the courage to tell you the great secret of my life. If I believed that you did not love me, or that you had ever loved any one else, I would not venture to put you to this test."
Harriet hung down her head, and her heart beat rapidly; the old story was before her, and his very words seemed now to forbid its revelation. His firm, self-reliant nature had never swerved from her, and he judged others by himself. His was a love that had begun from boyhood, and grown with his growth; should she raise the first suspicion against her by telling him all, when it was in her power—and only in her power—to make him happy, to make amends for all by her new love for him? Let him test her how he liked now, she was a woman who looked at life seriously, and the follies of her youth were over!
They walked on silently for awhile; they went on together, playing their love-dream out, and oblivious of the matter-of-fact world hustling them in their progress.
"This is the love test—and it must be a strange, pure love to exist after I have told all," he said.
"Do you doubt me, Sidney, already?"