eat sighs, as a wounded animal draws its breath, but he was
not noticing the physical pain of breathing. He did not catch at breath
as eagerly as he was trying to catch at this new idea, this new Sissy,
with a character and history so different from what he had supposed. His
was not a mind that took rational account of the differences between
characters, yet he began to realise now that the girl who had made her
own way, as this one had, was not the same as the girl he had imagined
wandering helplessly among pathless hills, and dying feebly there.

She still looked at him as if demanding an answer to her request, looked
at him curiously too, trying to estimate how ill he _was_. He did not
speak, and she, although she did not at all fathom his feeling, knew
instinctively that some influence she had had over him was lessened.

"Of course you can spoil my life if you like, Mr. Bates, but I've come
to ask you not. Someone's told me there's a mine found on our
clearin'--well, when I took your aunt's gold pieces I meant to leave you
the land for them. I'm too proud to go back on that now, _far_ too
proud; you can keep the money if you want to, or you can give me some of
it if you _want_ to. I'd like to be rich better than anything, but I'd
rather be poor as a church mouse, and free to get on my own way, than
have you to say what I ought to do every touch and turn, thinking I'd
only be good and sensible so long as I did what you told me" (there was
derision in her voice). "But now, as I say, you have the chance to make
me miserable if you choose; but I've come to ask you not to, although if
you do, I dare say I can live it down."

He looked at her bewildered. A few moments since and all the joy bells
of his life had been a-chime; they were still ringing, but jangling
confusedly out of tune, and--now she was asking him to conceal the cause
of his joy, that he had found her. He could not understand fully; his
mind would not clear itself.

"I won't do anything to make you miserable, Sissy," he said, faintly.

"You won't tell that you've seen me, or who I am, or anything?" she
insisted, half pleading, half threatening.

He turned his face from her to hide the ghastly faintness that was
coming over him. "I--I oughtn't to have tried to keep you, when I did,"
he said.

"No, you oughtn't to," she assented, quickly.

"And I won't speak of you now, if that's what you want."

"Thank you," she said, wondering what had made him tu