with me when you made my fingers bleed a few minutes ago."
"I made your——" and he snatched her hands and saw the tiny wounds. "Oh, forgive me! I did not know——" and he kissed them tenderly.
"Sweet wounds!" she said. "They told me more than all you have forgotten to tell me—all that I was aching to know."
"And you really care for me like that, Jean? For me! Is it possible? I wonder why?"
"Perhaps God had something to do with it. It is so very good that it must be from Him."
"Yes," he said emphatically.
"And now—when are you going to tell me that you care a little for me, and are not just taking me because I threw myself at your head and you could not help yourself?"
"Oh, Jean! Jean! you knew—though how I cannot tell. You have been shrined in my heart since that second time we met, but I knew it was hopeless——"
"Clever boy! And you hardly knew me then."
"I knew your eyes the moment I looked into them, and they have never left me since."
"Such common brown eyes! But you didn't know what lay behind them?"
"The most beautiful eyes in the world."
And by degrees they settled into quiet talk of the future.
He still feared she did not fully understand all she was giving up, and conscientiously endeavoured to make it clear to her.
She listened to please him, and because it was sweet to hear him, for all his thought in the matter was for her and her well-being.
So she let him go on; and when he had exhausted all his arguments, she said quietly—
"It is all nothing and less than nothing, dearest, compared with the rest. Where you go I go. Your work shall be my work, and your people my people, and nothing but death shall part us."
And with a heart that seemed like to burst for very fulness of joy in her, he said, "Amen!"
CHAPTER VI
A SUDDEN WIDE HORIZON
"Mr. Blair! The young man who spoke at the meeting the other night? Why, I didn't even know that you knew him, Jean!" said Aunt Jannet Harvey, gazing at her in wide-eyed wonder.
"Oh, I've known him since I was thirteen!"
"And you never spoke to me about him! Why I don't remember your ever even mentioning his name!"
"I don't believe I ever did. We will make up for it now, auntie."
"And he has really had the audacity to ask you to marry him?"
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