"'God bless me!'
"Yorke, I stood on the hearth, backed by the mantelpiece; 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 pitilessly 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
