!--do not look at me--let me hide my face; I want to get it over in
a hurry! Do you remember--" (sinking my voice to an indistinct and
struggling whisper)--"that night that you asked me about--about
_Brindley Wood_?"

"Yes, I remember."

Already, his tone has changed. His arms seem to be slackening their
close hold of me.

"Do not loose me!" cry I, passionately; "hold me tight, or I can _never_
tell you--how could you expect me? Well, that night--you know as well as
I do--I _lied_."

"You _did_?"

How hard and quick he is breathing! I am glad I cannot see his face.

"I _was_ there! I _did_ cry! she _did_ see me--"

I stop abruptly, choked by tears, by shame, by apprehension.

"Go on!" (spoken with panting shortness).

"He met me there!" I say, tremulously. "I do not know whether he did it
on purpose or not, and said dreadful things! must I tell you them?"
(shuddering)--"pah! it makes me sick--he said" (speaking with a
reluctant hurry)--"that he loved me, and that I loved him, and that I
_hated_ you, and it took me so by surprise--it was all so horrible, and
so different from what I had planned, that I cried--of course I ought
not, but I did--I _roared_!"

There does not seem to me any thing ludicrous in this mode of
expression, neither apparently does there to him.

"Well?"

"I do not think there is any thing more!" say I, slowly and timidly
raising my eyes, to judge of the effect of my confession, "only that I
was so _deadly, deadly_ ashamed; I thought it was such a shameful thing
to happen to any one that I made up my mind I would never tell anybody,
and I did not."

"And is that _all_?" he cries, with an intense and breathless anxiety in
eyes and voice, "are you sure that that is _all_?"

"All!" repeat I, opening my eyes very wide in astonishment; "do not you
think it is _enough_?"

"Are you sure," he cries, taking my face in his hands, and narrowly,
searchingly regarding it--"Child! child!--to-day let us have
nothing--_nothing_ but truth--are you sure that you did not a little
regret that it must be so--that you did not feel it a little hard to be
forever tied to my gray hairs--my eight-and-forty years?"

"Hush!" cry I, snatching away my hands, and putting them over my ears.
"I will not listen to you!--what do I care for your forty-eight
years?--If you were a hundred--two hundred--what is it to me?--what do I
care--I love you! I love you! I love you--O my darling, how stupid you
have been not t