late. You told me so much at our
first meeting, surely you might trust me yet a little farther."

"I have told you enough," she said at last "I cannot any longer eat the
bread of charity; I must go away and try to earn my own living."

"But what will you do?"

"What do other girls do? Teaching, needlework, anything. Remember, I'm
an experienced teacher and a graduate to boot." Her pathetic smile lit
up the face with tremulous tenderness.

"But you would be quite alone in the world," he said, solicitude
vibrating in every syllable.

"I am used to being quite alone in the world."

The phrase threw a flash of light along the backward vista of her life
with the Goldsmiths, and filled his soul with pity and yearning.

"But suppose you fail?"

"If I fail--" she repeated, and rounded off the sentence with a shrug.
It was the apathetic, indifferent shrug of Moses Ansell; only his was
the shrug of faith in Providence, hers of despair. It filled Raphael's
heart with deadly cold and his soul with sinister forebodings. The
pathos of her position seemed to him intolerable.

"No, no, this must not be!" he cried, and his hand gripped hers
fiercely, as if he were afraid of her being dragged away by main force.
He was terribly agitated; his whole being seemed to be undergoing
profound and novel emotions. Their eyes met; in one and the same instant
the knowledge broke upon her that she loved him, and that if she chose
to play the woman he was hers, and life a Paradisian dream. The
sweetness of the thought intoxicated her, thrilled her veins with fire.
But the next instant she was chilled as by a gray cold fog. The
realities of things came back, a whirl of self-contemptuous thoughts
blent with a hopeless sense of the harshness of life. Who was she to
aspire to such a match? Had her earlier day-dream left her no wiser than
that? The _Schnorrer's_ daughter setting her cap at the wealthy Oxford
man, forsooth! What would people say? And what would they say if they
knew how she had sought him out in his busy seclusion to pitch a tale of
woe and move him by his tenderness of heart to a pity he mistook
momentarily for love? The image of Levi came back suddenly; she
quivered, reading herself through his eyes. And yet would not his crude
view be right? Suppress the consciousness as she would in her maiden
breast, had she not been urged hither by an irresistible impulse?
Knowing what she felt now, she could not realize she had been ignor