“Have I injured you so much, Lizzie?”

“No, no. You may set me quite right. I don’t speak of the past, Mr. Wrayburn, but of the present and the future. Are we not here now, because through two days you have followed me so closely where there are so many eyes to see you, that I consented to this appointment as an escape?”

“Again, not very flattering to my self-love,” said Eugene, moodily; “but yes. Yes. Yes.”

“Then I beseech you, Mr. Wrayburn, I beg and pray you, leave this neighbourhood. If you do not, consider to what you will drive me.”

He did consider within himself for a moment or two, and then retorted, “Drive you? To what shall I drive you, Lizzie?”

“You will drive me away. I live here peacefully and respected, and I am well employed here. You will force me to quit this place as I quitted London, and — by following me again — will force me to quit the next place in which I may find refuge, as I quitted this.”

“Are you so determined, Lizzie — forgive the word I am going to use, for its literal truth — to fly from a lover?”

“I am so determined,” she answered resolutely, though trembling, “to fly from such a lover. There was a poor woman died here but a little while ago, scores of years older than I am, whom I found by chance, lying on the wet earth. You may have heard some account of her?”

“I think I have,” he answered, “if her name was Higden.”

“Her name was Higden. Though she was so weak and old, she kept true to one purpose to the very last. Even at the very last, she made me promise that her purpose should be kept to, after she was dead, so settled was her determination. What she did, I can do. Mr. Wrayburn, if I believed — but I do not believe — that you could be so cruel to me as to drive me from place to place to wear me out, you should drive me to death and not do it.”

He looked full at her handsome face, and in his own handsome face there was a light of blended admiration, anger, and reproach, which she — who loved him so in secret — whose heart had long been so full, and he the cause of its overflowing — drooped before. She tried hard to retain her firmness, but he saw it melting away under his eyes. In the moment of its dissolution, and of his first full knowledge of his influence upon her, she dropped, and he caught her on his arm.

“Lizzie! Rest so a moment. Answer what I ask you. If I had not been what you call removed from you and cut off from you, would you have made this appeal to me to leave you?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. Don’t ask me, Mr. Wrayburn. Let me go back.”

“I swear to you, Lizzie, you shall go directly. I swear to you, you shall go alone. I’ll not accompany you, I’ll not follow you, if you will reply.”

“How can I, Mr. Wrayburn? How can I tell you what I should have done, if you had not been what you are?”

“If I had not been what you make me out to be,” he struck in, skilfully changing the form of words, “would you still have hated me?”

“O Mr. Wrayburn,” she replied appealingly, and weeping, “you know me better than to think I do!”

“If I had not been what you make me out to be, Lizzie, would you still have been indifferent to me?”