n minutes before the train starts. I have just
fifteen to give you, because it will take me one minute to reach my
seat. Therefore, whatever you have to say, my dear, had better be said
at once."

"I have not come here to reproach you, Fabian Rockharrt," she said,
fixing him with her eyes.

"That is kind of you at all events."

"No; we reproach a man for carelessness, for thoughtlessness, for
forgetfulness; but for baseness, villainy, treachery like yours it is
not reproach, it is--"

"Magnanimity or murder! I suppose so. Let it be magnanimity, Rose. I
have never done you anything but good since I first met your face, now
twenty years ago. You were but sixteen then. You are thirty-six now,
and, by Jove! handsomer than ever."

"Thank you; I quite well know that I am. My looking glass, that never
flatters, tells me so."

"Then why, in the name of common sense, can you not be happy? Look you,
Rose, you have no cause to complain of me. When even in your childhood,
you--"

"How dare you throw that up to me!" she exclaimed.

He went on as if he had not heard her.

"Were utterly lost and ruined through the villainy of your first
lover--what did I do? I took you up, got a place for you in my father's
house as the governess of my niece."

"Well, I worked for my living there, did I not? I gave a fair day's work
for a fair day's wages, as your stony old father would say."

"Certainly, you did. But you would not have had an opportunity of doing
so in any honest way if it had not been for me."

"How dare you hit me in the teeth with that!"

"Only in self-defense, my Rose."

"It was with an ulterior, a selfish, a wicked end in view. You know it."

"I know, and Heaven knows that I served you from pure benevolence and
from no other motive. Gracious goodness! why, I was over head and ears
in love with another woman at that time. But you, Rose, you made a dead
set at me. You did not care for me the least in life, but you cared for
wealth and position, and you were bound to have them if you could."

"Coward!" she hissed, "to talk to me in this way."

"I am not finding fault with you the least in the world. You acted
naturally on the principles of self-interest and self-preservation. You
wanted me to marry you, but I could not do that under the circumstances.
By Jove! though, I did more for you than I ever did for any other living
woman and with less reward--with no reward at all, in fact. When your
time was up at Roc