nobly born, weary you with importunities into consent. I too have

a pride of my own: and I declare before the holy mother of God, if

you should now go back from your word already given, I would no

more marry you than I would marry my uncle's groom."

Denis smiled a little bitterly.

"It is a small love," he said, "that shies at a little pride."

She made no answer, although she probably had her own thoughts.

"Come hither to the window," he said, with a sigh. "Here is the

dawn."

And indeed the dawn was already beginning. The hollow of the sky

was full of essential daylight, colourless and clean; and the

valley underneath was flooded with a grey reflection. A few thin

vapours clung in the coves of the forest or lay along the winding

course of the river. The scene disengaged a surprising effect of

stillness, which was hardly interrupted when the cocks began once

more to crow among the steadings. Perhaps the same fellow who had

made so horrid a clangour in the darkness not half-an-hour before,

now sent up the merriest cheer to greet the coming day. A little

wind went bustling and eddying among the tree-tops underneath the

windows. And still the daylight kept flooding insensibly out of

the east, which was soon to grow incandescent and cast up that red-

hot cannon-ball, the rising sun.

Denis looked out over all this with a bit of a shiver. He had

taken her hand, and retained it in his almost unconsciously.

"Has the day begun already?" she said; and then, illogically

enough: "the night has been so long! Alas, what shall we say to

my uncle when he returns?"

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