Do not go just now, Clarissa."

"Only that I said I would," she answered, pleading that she must keep
a promise which she had never made.

"Mary can spare you,--and I cannot. Mary is staying with you, and I
shall be gone,--almost immediately. I go back to Newton to-morrow,
and who can say when I shall see you again?"

"You will be coming up to London, of course."

"I am here now at any rate," he said smiling, "and will take what
advantage of it I can. It is the old story, Clarissa;--so old that I
know you must be sick of it."

"If you think so, you should not tell it again."

"Do not be ill-natured to me. I don't know why it is but a man gets
to be ashamed of himself, as though he were doing something mean
and paltry, when he loves with persistence, as I do." Had it been
possible that she should give him so much encouragement she would
have told him that the mean man, and paltry, was he who could love or
pretend to love with no capacity for persistency. She could not fail
to draw a comparison between him and his brother, in which there was
so much of meanness on the part of him who had at one time been as a
god to her, and so much nobility in him to whom she was and ever had
been as a goddess. "I suppose a man should take an answer and have
done with it," he continued. "But how is a man to have done with it,
when his heart remains the same?"

"A man should master his heart."

"I am, then, to understand that that which you have said so often
before must be said again?" He had never knelt to her, and he did not
kneel now; but he leaned over her so that she hardly knew whether
he was on his knees or still seated on his chair. And she herself,
though she answered him briskly,--almost with impertinence,--was so
little mistress of herself that she knew not what she said. She would
take him now,--if only she knew how to take him without disgracing
herself in her own estimation. "Dear Clary, think of it. Try to love
me. I need not tell you again how true is my love for you." He had
hold of her hand, and she did not withdraw it, and he ought to have
known that the battle was won. But he knew nothing. He hardly knew
that her hand was in his. "Clary, you are all the world to me. Must I
go back heart-laden, but empty-handed, with no comfort?"

"If you knew all!" she said, rising suddenly from her chair.

"All what?"

"If you knew all, you would not take me though I offered myself."
He stood staring at her, not at all