'Now, why don't you marry her yourself?'

To have the wish which has been secretly gnawing at the foundations of your heart suddenly brought face to face with you is a startling and confounding experience. I think no convicted ruffian can ever have looked more guiltily ashamed of himself than I, as I felt the hot blood mount to my head, and my brain swim with the first full consciousness of a futile passion. Of course, the man before me put the worst construction upon my evident confusion; he repeated in a louder and more blustering tone—

'Why don't you marry her?'

'In the first place,' said I quietly, 'she is scarcely more than a child, Mr. Ellmer.'

'That's not much of a fault, for she won't improve as she loses it. Besides, you needn't marry her at once.'

'In the second place, I am quite sure she wouldn't have me.'

'Why not? She seems to like you.'

'She does like me, as a beautiful girl may like a grandfather, battered and scarred in war, or a homeless cur which she has picked up and which has grown attached to her. To be frank with you, Mr. Ellmer, nothing but my ugly face prevents me from becoming a suitor for your daughter; but that obstacle is one which, without any undue self-depreciation, I know to be one which makes happy marriage impossible for me.'

'I don't know,' said Mr. Ellmer, in a tone of generous encouragement; 'good looks don't always carry it off with the women. Look at my wife, now: well, to be sure, she was proud enough of getting me; but, do you think the feeling lasted? No, I might have been a one-eyed hunchback, sir, before we'd been man and wife three months! There's no knowing what those creatures will like, let alone the fact that they never like the same thing more than a week together—barring a miracle.'

And Mr. Ellmer looked at me, with his head a little on one side, as if expecting that the narration of his experience would conclusively affect my views on matrimony. As I said nothing, however, being, indeed, too much involved in a whirlpool of doubts and longings and miserable certainties to have any neatly-turned phrases ready with which to carry on the conversation, he presently cleared his throat and went on again.