o me, and let us get it over at once. It is
a real true relief to me that I am not obliged, in what I have now to
say, to enter into the question--the hard and cruel question as I think
it--of social inequalities. Circumstances which will try you to the
quick, spare me the ungracious necessity of paining a man who has lived
in friendly intimacy under the same roof with myself by any humiliating
reference to matters of rank and station. You must leave Limmeridge
House, Mr. Hartright, before more harm is done. It is my duty to say
that to you; and it would be equally my duty to say it, under precisely
the same serious necessity, if you were the representative of the
oldest and wealthiest family in England. You must leave us, not because
you are a teacher of drawing----"

She waited a moment, turned her face full on me, and reaching across
the table, laid her hand firmly on my arm.

"Not because you are a teacher of drawing," she repeated, "but because
Laura Fairlie is engaged to be married."

The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all
sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved and never spoke.
The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at our feet came
as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead leaves
too, whirled away by the wind like the rest. Hopes! Betrothed, or not
betrothed, she was equally far from me. Would other men have remembered
that in my place? Not if they had loved her as I did.

The pang passed, and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it remained.
I felt Miss Halcombe's hand again, tightening its hold on my arm--I
raised my head and looked at her. Her large black eyes were rooted on
me, watching the white change on my face, which I felt, and which she
saw.

"Crush it!" she said. "Here, where you first saw her, crush it! Don't
shrink under it like a woman. Tear it out; trample it under foot like
a man!"

The suppressed vehemence with which she spoke, the strength which her
will--concentrated in the look she fixed on me, and in the hold on my
arm that she had not yet relinquished--communicated to mine, steadied
me. We both waited for a minute in silence. At the end of that time I
had justified her generous faith in my manhood--I had, outwardly at
least, recovered my self-control.

"Are you yourself again?"

"Enough myself, Miss Halcombe, to ask your pardon and hers. Enough
myself to be guided by your advice, and to prove my grati