"But long enough to love you with a love that will last all my life," George answered eagerly. "I shall have no thought except to make you happy, Isabel. I know that you are so beautiful that you ought to marry a very different fellow from me,—a man who could give you a grand house, and carriages and horses, and all that sort of thing; but he could never love you better than I, and he mightn't love you as well, perhaps; and I'll work for you, Isabel, as no man ever worked before. You shall never know what poverty is, darling, if you will be my wife."
"I shouldn't mind being poor," Isabel answered, dreamily.
She was thinking that Walter Gay had been poor, and that the chief romance of Florence's life had been the quiet wedding in the little City church, and the long sea voyage with her young husband. This sort of poverty was almost as nice as poor Edith's miserable wealth, with diamonds flung about and trampled upon, and ruby velvet for every-day wear.
"I shouldn't mind so much being poor," repeated the girl; for she thought, if she didn't marry a duke or a Dombey, it would be at least something to experience the sentimental phase of poverty.
George Gilbert seized upon the words.
"Ah, then, you will marry me, dearest Isabel? you will marry me, my own darling, my beautiful wife?"
He was almost startled by the intensity of his own feelings, as he bent down and kissed the little ungloved hand lying on the moss-grown stonework of the bridge.
"Oh, Isabel, if you could only know how happy you have made me! if you could only know—"
She looked at him with a startled expression in her face. Was it all settled, then, so suddenly—with so little consideration? Yes, it was all settled; she was beloved with one of those passions that endure for a lifetime. George had said something to that effect. The story had begun, and she was a heroine.
"Good gracious me!" cried Mr. Smith, as he bounded on the parapet of the little bridge, and disported himself there in the character of an amateur Blondin; "if the model old woman who has had so many prizes—we've been looking at her diplomas, framed and glazed, in a parlour that I couldn't have believed to exist out of "Lilian the Deserted" (who begins life as the cottager's daughter, you know, and elopes with the squire in top-boots out of a diamond-paned window—and I've been trying the model old woman's windows, and Lilian couldn't have done it),—but I was about to remark, that if the old woman hasn't had a prize for a model temper, you two will catch it for keeping the tea waiting. Why, Izzie, what's the matter? you and George are both looking as spooney as—is it, eh?—yes, it is: isn't it? Hooray! Didn't I see it from the first?" cried Mr. Smith, striking an attitude upon the balustrade, and pointing down to the two blushing faces with a triumphant finger. "When George asked me for your letter, Izzie,—the little bit of a letter you wrote me when you left Camberwell,—didn't I see him fold it up as gingerly as if it had been a fifty-pound note and slip it into his waistcoat-pocket, and then try to look as if he hadn't done it? Do you think I wasn't fly, then? A pretty knowledge of human nature I should have, if I couldn't see through that. The creator of Octavio Montefiasco, the Demon of the Galleys, flatters himself that he understands the obscurest diagnostic of the complaint commonly designated 'spoons.' Don't be downhearted, George," exclaimed Sigismund, jumping suddenly off the parapet of the bridge, and extending his hand to his friend. "Accept the congratulations of one who, with a heart long ber-lighted by the ber-lasting in-fer-luence of ker-rime, can-er yet-er feel a generous ther-rob in unison with virr-tue."