The Cotton Factory Times. — 1902-10-31 (Manchester, Greater Manchester, England)

CEIAPTER IV.  Astley Darwen, though he was not, yet seven and twenty, had knocked about the world, and seen something of life, both in peace and war, and et home and abroad. But never had it occurred to him before to meet with a girl like this oue, who was both shy and bold, innocent and yet shrewd, at the same time.  Never before, either, had it happened to him to have an offer of marriage made to him by a lady, and the conjunction of such singular circumstAnces went nigh to overwhelining him. Norma guessed something of what .was passing in his mind, and the blush which had rapidly overspread her face suddenly died away. " You're disgusted with me, of course," said she biting her lip, and turning away bur bead, while her eyes filled with tears. Astley answered her quickly, with a warmth and kindness there was no mistaking.  "Indeed I'm not. The feelin.; uppermost in me at this moment is the most intense sympathy for you, the strongest wish to be a 09C to you. I'm only wondering what I can do. What you suggest wouldn't do anything but plunge you into fresh troubles."  "1 suppose I was mad to suggest it," mumbled Norma, "bat it would have set me free. And as you're always protesting you would never marry any money, and complaining of your poverty at the same time, why I thought you might help me, and let me help you at the same time. For we would have gone shares in what I have, and I should have been grateful to you to my life's end." Astley felt a natural difficulty in realising the intense force of passionate feeling in this girl, which made her so unable to face common accidents of life squarely and sanely. That she should have attempted suicide; that she should now suggest the maddest of mad expedients, merely to free herself from the society of uncongenial companions, did indeed suggest a nature so out of the common run that to suppose her mad would have been a pardonable assumption. But, pardonable as it would have lxien,Astley did not fall into this mistake. Knowing what he did of her parentage, appreciating too the constant irritation which the restraints of her uncongenial life pat upon her, and the steady determination with which all the members of the Bascot family pnrsned their intention of forcing her into an illassorted marriage, he saw that her desperation was not the result of insanity, but of ignorance. This girl, brought up in a convent school abroad, and accustomed to hear of marriages arranged on business principles only, had hit upon a way out of her misery, without realising the fresh difficulties to which the course she proposed would give rise.  It was not easy to put the matter in a right light. "Don't you know," he said gently, when they had walked side by side for some moments without speaking, "that there's no such thing as half-marriage? Matrimony contracted in a registry-office is every bit as binding as if the ceremony were per. formed in a church." "But it wouldn't seem the same !" retorted Norma quickly. "I could never feet that a man to whom I'd only been married in an office was really my husband." . .  'Aetley smiled at her feminine view of the matter.  "What you would feel doesn't matter: I'm you what would be the fact," said he. " If I were some needy and unscrupulous adventurer—"  " Oh!" interrupted Norin). with an indignant flash of the eyes. "I repeat, if I were some penniless rascal, ready and eager to profit by your impatient generosity—" _  "I'm not generous, and you're not an adventurer, so it's ridiculous to put it like thatAl " Will you listen to me, Miss Bascot, or will you not ?" said Astley, with half-serious peremptoriMSC  „ "I'll listen,” said Norma, after a moment's pause, submissively enough. :‘U I were to marry you—r--"..,  " At a registry office," put in Norma. "At a registry office or anywhere else, you would be legally my wife, and therefore you would be precluded from marrying anybody else as long as I lived. you never seem to have thought of that." "But there's nothing I'm more determined about than this, that I will never marry at all," said