Her eyes went down now before the look in his.
"I'll tell you fairly that I longed with all my heart to take you to some place worthy of your beauty and find a wedding gown for you--not necessarily a very costly one, but one that should bring out all you are capable of showing. But when I saw you, looking just yourself, in the silk that was like your mother's,"--he leaned forward, taking both her hands in his and looking straight into her face, compelling her gaze to lift to his lest she should miss what she knew was there,--"I felt something inside my heart break wide open--with worship for you, little, strong, splendid spirit that you are!"
He pressed the hands against his lips. Then he touched two rings upon her left hand: exquisite and rare jewels were set in both engagement and wedding rings, after the modern fashion. But there was a third ring there, guarding the others, a slender band of gold, worn thin by many years of hard, self-forgetting work--the ring which David Warne had placed twenty-seven years ago upon the hand of his bride. Jefferson Craig studied all three, turning them round and round upon the rosy finger they encircled.
Presently he spoke again, very gently: "My rings on your hand mean to me love and beauty, loyalty and truth. But her ring stands for all that and--service. We need it there, to remind us what we owe the world we live in. She paid her debt; we'll pay ours, in memory of her. Bless her for giving me her daughter!"
For a minute Georgiana could not speak. Then, with her dark eyes sparkling through the mist of tears which had taken her unawares, she seized his hand and lifted it to press her glowing cheek against it, saying passionately: "Oh, _how_ you understand!"
They were silent for a long time after that, while the train flew on, through the gathering darkness of the late December afternoon, into the night....
Georgiana had supposed that they were to go at once to the old home, for she knew that Craig could not be long away at this time, and there was much to do there. But she found that instead of changing trains in the great city, sixty miles beyond which lay the home village, they were leaving the station to be conveyed in a waiting car to a hotel.