All the beauty of her voice lent its charm to the next words that she said to him.

The woman's heart hungered in its misery for the comfort that could only come from his lips.
"_You_ would have loved me, Horace--without stopping to think of the family name ?" The family name again! How strangely she persisted in coming back to that! Horace looked at her without answering, trying vainly to fathom what was passing in her mind.
She took his hand, and wrung it hard--as if she would wring the answer out of him in that way.
"_You_ would have loved me ?" she repeated.
The double spell of her voice and her touch was on him.

He answered, warmly, "Under any circumstances! under any name!" She put one arm round his neck, and fixed her eyes on his.

"Is that true ?" she asked.
"True as t he heaven above us!" She drank in those few commonplace words with a greedy delight.

She forced him to repeat them in a new form.
"No matter who I might have been?
For myself alone ?" "For yourself alone." She threw both arms round him, and laid her head passionately on his breast.