"If you care for me," she said, taking one of his hands in both her own, "I am yours to take by reason of my love for you, and by reason of your having restored my life when I had given it up. When I gave it up it was no longer mine. It became yours when you gave it back to me. What is left of it is yours, and everything else I have. Even my very name must be yours if you claim me."
"I do claim you, and no power on earth shall take you from me."
"Or you from me?"
"Or me from you, I swear."
He kissed her again. That was the betrothal.
There was nothing violent in the scene. Except for the two kisses and the beautiful light in the eyes of the woman and the clasping hands, any one seeing it and hearing nothing would have had no reason to suspect that it was a love scene. He was calm, firm, persistent, grave. He did not smile once. He indulged in no heroics, no extravagances, no transports. She admired him all the more for this. Anything of the kind would have been out of place, shocking. She was no young girl, to be won by rhapsodies or carried away by transports. She knew that although her youth had left her all her good looks were not yet gone. But he never said a word about her beauty. He was too sensible, and too noble, and too chivalrous, she told herself, to think she, a woman of forty-seven and in weak health, could be pleased by flippant flattery.
They sat hand in hand for a while, she in a dream of contented happiness. To her this was not the aftermath of love gathered off an autumn land; it was the first growth, which had never come above the soil until now, because no sun had shone on the field before.
There came no let or hindrance in the course of William Goddard's wooing. He had only been a few months in Richmond, but during that time his conduct there had been above reproach. At first, it is true, he had not been a regular attendant at church on Sunday. He had gone now and then, but not every Sabbath. From the beginning of his love-making he never missed the forenoon, and often attended the evening, services. He kept much to himself, and made no friends. He was a strict teetotaler, and frequented no such profitless places as clubs or billiard-rooms. When people heard of the engagement between Mrs. Crawford and William Goddard they said she was a lucky woman, and that her second husband would be even better, if such a thing were possible, than her first. If there had been in the whole town a rumour to his disadvantage it would have swelled into a howl, for those who knew the gentle widow felt a personal interest in her, a love for her, as though she had been a mother or sister.
When Mrs. Farraday went finally to take the head of her brother's (Edward Chatterton's) house at Rochester she naturally told him all the news of Richmond, of the fire, the rescue, the love-making, the engagement or understanding between the widow and the heroic next-door lodger. She told him everything she knew, and minutely described the two people and the two houses.
Her brother seemed interested. He was a florid, well conditioned, good-humoured, shrewd man of fifty, not averse from gossip in the evening when he sat in front of his own fire, with his legs stretched out before him, smoking his pipe.