“But what is the other thing I can do?”

It was strangely hard to say.  There came a peculiar sensation in his throat and facial muscles, a nervous stress between laughing and crying.  All the world vanished before that great desire.  And he was afraid she would not dare, that she would not take him seriously.

“What is it?” she said again.

“Don’t you see that we can marry?” he said, with the flood of his resolution suddenly strong and steady.  “Don’t you see that is the only thing for us?  The dead lane we are in!  You must come out of your cheating, and I must come out of my ... cramming.  And we—­we must marry.”

He paused and then became eloquent.  “The world is against us, against—­us.  To you it offers money to cheat—­to be ignoble.  For it is ignoble!  It offers you no honest way, only a miserable drudgery.  And it keeps you from me.  And me too it bribes with the promise of success—­if I will desert you ...  You don’t know all ...  We may have to wait for years—­we may have to wait for ever, if we wait until life is safe.  We may be separated....  We may lose one another altogether....  Let us fight against it.  Why should we separate?  Unless True Love is like the other things—­an empty cant.  This is the only way.  We two—­who belong to one another.”

She looked at him, her face perplexed with this new idea, her heart beating very fast.  “We are so young,” she said.  “And how are we to live?  You get a guinea.”

“I can get more—­I can earn more, I have thought it out.  I have been thinking of it these two days.  I have been thinking what we could do.  I have money.”

“You have money?”

“Nearly a hundred pounds.”

“But we are so young—­And my mother ...”

“We won’t ask her.  We will ask no one.  This is our affair.  Ethel! this is our affair.  It is not a question of ways and means—­even before this—­I have thought ...  Dear one!—­don’t you love me?”

She did not grasp his emotional quality.  She looked at him with puzzled eyes—­still practical—­making the suggestion arithmetical.

“I could typewrite if I had a machine.  I have heard—­”

“It’s not a question of ways and means.  Now.  Ethel—­I have longed—­”

He stopped.  She looked at his face, at his eyes now eager and eloquent with the things that never shaped themselves into words.

“Dare you come with me?” he whispered.

Suddenly the world opened out in reality to her as sometimes it had opened out to her in wistful dreams.  And she quailed before it.  She dropped her eyes from his.  She became a fellow-conspirator.  “But, how—?”

“I will think how.  Trust me!  Surely we know each other now—­Think!  We two—­”

“But I have never thought—­”

“I could get apartments for us both.  It would be so easy.  And think of it—­think—­of what life would be!”