‘Tak’ patience, Robert, till the moon rises, and I can see you. Speak plain out—did you love her or not? I could like to know; I feel curious.’

‘Sir … Sir—I say—she is very pretty, in her own style, and very attractive. She has a look, at times, of a thing made out of fire and air, at which I stand and marvel, without a thought of clasping and kissing it. I felt in her a powerful magnet to my interest and vanity; I never felt as if nature meant her to be my other and better self. When a question on that head rushed upon me, I flung it off, saying brutally, I should be rich with her, and ruined without her; vowing I would be practical, and not romantic.’

‘A very sensible resolve. What mischief came of it, Bob?’

‘With this sensible resolve, I walked up to Fieldhead one night last August; it was the very eve of my departure for Birmingham—for—you see—I wanted to secure Fortune’s splendid prize; I had previously despatched a note, requesting a private interview. I found her at home, and alone.

‘She received me without embarrassment, for she thought I came on business. I was embarrassed enough, but determined. I hardly know how I got the operation over, but I went to work in a hard, firm fashion, frightful enough, I dare say. I sternly offered myself—my fine person—with my debts, of course, as a settlement.

‘It vexed me; it kindled my ire to find that she neither blushed, trembled nor looked down. She responded: “I doubt whether I have understood you, Mr. Moore.”

‘And I had to go over the whole proposal twice, and word it as plainly as A B C, before she would fully take it in. And then what did she do? Instead of faltering a sweet Yes, or maintaining a soft, confused silence, which would have been as good, she started up, walked twice fast through the room, in the way that she only does, and no other woman, and ejaculated: “God bless me!”

‘Yorke, I stood on the hearth, backed by the mantel-piece—against it I leaned, and prepared for anything, everything. I knew my doom, and I knew myself. There was no misunderstanding her aspect and voice. She stopped and looked at me.

‘ “God bless me!” she piteously repeated in that shocked, indignant, yet saddened accent. “You have made a strange proposal—strange from you; and if you knew how strangely you worded it, and looked it, you would be startled at yourself. You spoke like a brigand who demanded my purse, rather than like a lover who asked my heart.”

‘A queer sentence, was it not, Yorke? And I knew, as she uttered it, it was true as queer. Her words were a mirror in which I saw myself.

‘I looked at her, dumb and wolfish. She at once enraged and shamed me.

‘ “Gérard Moore, you know you don’t love Shirley Keeldar.”

‘I might have broken out into false swearing—vowed that I did love her—but I could not lie in her pure face; I could not perjure myself in her truthful presence. Besides, such hollow oaths would have been vain as void—she would no more have believed me than she would have believed the ghost of Judas had he broken from the night and stood before her. Her female heart had finer perceptions than to be cheated into mistaking my half-coarse, half-cold admiration for true-throbbing, manly love.

‘ “What next happened?” you will say, Mr. Yorke.

‘Why, she sat down in the window-seat and cried. She cried passionately. Her eyes not only rained, but lightened. They flashed, open, large, dark, haughty, upon me. They said: “You have pained me; you have outraged me; you have deceived me.”