You and I engaged ourselves to each other yesterday as man and wife." "Of course we did." "Listen to me, dear Fred.

In doing that there was nothing in my mind unbefitting the sadness of the day.

Even in death we must think of life, and if it were well for you and me that we should be together, it would surely have been but a foolish ceremony between us to have abstained from telling each other that it would be so because my aunt had died last week.

But it may be, and I think it is the case, that the feelings arising from her death have made us both too precipitate." "I don't understand how that can be." "You have been anxious to keep a promise made to her, without considering sufficiently whether in doing so you would secure your own happiness; and I--" "I don't know about you, but as regards myself I must be considered to be the best judge." "And I have been too much in a hurry in believing that which I wished to believe." "What do you mean by all this, Clara ?" "I mean that our engagement shall be at an end;--not necessarily so for always.

But that as an engagement binding us both, it shall for the present cease to exist.