supplies are cut off!..."

"I can excuse him for thinking it," said Lady Charlotte. She exhibited
no sign of eagerness for his statement of facts.

Her outward composure and a hard animation of countenance (which,
having ceased the talking within himself, he had now leisure to notice)
humiliated him. The sting helped him to progress.

"I may try to doubt it as much as I please, to avoid seeing what must
follow.... I may shut my eyes in the dark, but when the light stares me
in the face...I give you my word that I have not been justified even in
imagining such a catastrophe."

"The preamble is awful," said Lady Charlotte, rising from her recumbent
posture.

"Pardon me; I have no right to intrude my feelings. I learn to-day, for
the first time, that we are--are ruined."

She did not lift her eyebrows, or look fixedly; but without any change
at all, said, "Is there no doubt about it?"

"None whatever." This was given emphatically. Resentment at the perfect
realization of her anticipated worldly indifference lent him force.

"Ruined?" she said.

"Yes."

"You I'll be more so than you were a month ago. I mean, you tell me
nothing new, I have known it."

Amid the crush and hurry in his brain, caused by this strange
communication, pressed the necessity to vindicate his honour.

"I give you the word of a gentleman, Lady Charlotte, that I came to
you the first moment it has been made known to me. I never suspected it
before this day."

"Nothing would prompt me to disbelieve that." She reached him her hand.

"You have known it!" he broke from a short silence.

"Yes--never mind how. I could not allude to it. Of course I had to wait
till you took the initiative."

The impulse to think the best of what we are on the point of renouncing
is spontaneous. If at the same time this object shall exhibit itself
in altogether new, undreamt-of, glorious colours, others besides a
sentimentalist might waver, and be in some danger of clutching it a
little tenderly ere it is cast off.

"My duty was to tell you the very instant it came to my knowledge," he
said, fascinated in his heart by the display of greatness of mind which
he now half divined to be approaching, and wished to avoid.

"Well, I suppose that is a duty between friends?" said she.

"Between friends! Shall we still--always be friends?"

"I think I have said more than once that it won't be my fault if we are
not."

"Because, the greater and happier ambition t