"But I hope for it." There wasn't any mistaking the meaning of that tone; she knew what was coming.

She folded her hands in her lap, and there softly entered and pervaded her a quiet, enormous content that made her seem the crown of the quiet beauty of that evening sky whose ocean of purple-tinted crystal stretched away toward the shores of the infinite.
"Madelene," he began in a self-conscious voice, "you know what my position is, and what I get, and my prospects.

But you know what I was, too; and so, I feel I've the right to ask you to marry me--to wait until I get back to the place from which I had to come down." The light was fading from the sky, from her eyes, from her heart.

A moment before he had been there, so near her, so at one with her; now he was far away, and this voice she heard wasn't his at all.

And his words--She felt alone in the dark and the cold, the victim of a cheat upon her deepest feelings.
"I was bitter against my father at first," he went on.