"Conditionally?"
"Yes; it named a date. That is why until to-day there was nothing that I could tell you."
"Not even the fact that he had asked you to marry him?"
"I could not wish that to be known, if nothing was to come if it—not by any one."
"It would have been better, my child."
"No, papa; why should you, or any one, know what I had had to give up?"
"Of course, it would have been painful; that I can understand."
"I can smile at it now," she said; "but at the time it was terrible! For I found, then, how much I loved him."
The Archbishop withheld all speech for a moment, then said tenderly—
"I am very sorry for you, my child."