her. She liked to see me often, and it cost a good deal to get suitable nurses. She needed other things, of course. I was in debt, too, for my education. I’ve been paying that off by degrees. Take it all, I’ve got run down, somehow. Mother used to say I had her constitution. The people here called me to supply awhile, but they said I had too poor health to settle without trial. I don’t wonder. They don’t want a minister to die of consumption on their hands.”

[22]

He stopped abruptly, and cast a bitter look at the young girl’s drooping face to see how these blows struck that gentle surface. She did not lift it, but by the space of a breath she seemed to stir and tremble toward him.

“I love you,” said the young man, flinging his thin hands out as if he thrust her from him. “A carpenter-parson, without a dollar or a pulpit he can call his own, and some day doomed to be a sick man at that! Go! I will never ask you to be my wife. Beacon Street! Do you think there is a man in Beacon Street who will ever love you as I do? Try it. Go and try. Go back to your brother. Tell him I scorned to ask you to marry me—for your sake, oh my Love!”

His voice fell into the whisper of unutterable passion and sacrifice, and he covered his face and groaned. Then Mary Worcester lifted her unworldly eyes and looked upon him as a woman looks but once in life, and upon but one.

“But if,” she said, “I should ask you?”

He gasped, and sprang to his feet. Then he saw how she trembled before him. And she stretched up her arms. So he took her to his heart; and before the snow fell upon the hills of Bethlehem she had become his wife.

Life dealt with them as the coldest head on Beacon Street might have predicted. Her brother fell at first into burning anger, and then into a frozen rage. When the thing became inevitable, he treated her civilly, for he was a gentleman;[23] more than that she never sought from him, and did not receive. She married her country parson intelligently, deliberately, and joyously, and shared his lot without an outcry. She knew one year of blessedness, and treasured it as a proof of paradise to come. She knew one such year as the saddest of us would die to know, and the gladdest could not look upon without a pang of divine envy. She knew what love, elect, supreme, and unspotted from the world, as the old words say, can give a woman, and can do for her. And then she reached the chapter where the plot turns in the beautiful, 

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