marry
Lord George Carruthers."

"There is no truth in it."

"And you do not wish to stay here in order that there may be an
engagement? I am obliged to ask you home questions, Lizzie, as I
could not otherwise advise you."

"You do, indeed, ask home questions."

"I will desist at once, if they be disagreeable."

"Frank, you are false to me!" As she said this she rose in her bed,
and sat with her eyes fixed upon his, and her thin hands stretched
out upon the bedclothes. "You know that I cannot wish to be engaged
to him or to any other man. You know, better almost than I can
know myself, how my heart stands. There has, at any rate, been no
hypocrisy with me in regard to you. Everything has been told to
you;--at what cost I will not now say. The honest woman, I fear,
fares worse even than the honest man of whom you spoke. I think you
admitted that he would be appreciated at last. She to her dying day
must pay the penalty of her transgressions. Honesty in a woman the
world never forgives." When she had done speaking, he sat silent by
her bedside, but, almost unconsciously, he stretched out his left
hand and took her right hand in his. For a few seconds she admitted
this, and she lay there with their hands clasped. Then with a start
she drew back her arm, and retreated as it were from his touch. "How
dare you," she said, "press my hand, when you know that such pressure
from you is treacherous and damnable!"

"Damnable, Lizzie!"

"Yes;--damnable. I will not pick my words for you. Coming from you,
what does such pressure mean?"

"Affection."

"Yes;--and of what sort? You are wicked enough to feed my love by
such tokens, when you know that you do not mean to return it. Oh,
Frank, Frank, will you give me back my heart? What was it that you
promised me when we sat together upon the rocks at Portray?"

It is inexpressibly difficult for a man to refuse the tender of a
woman's love. We may almost say that a man should do so as a matter
of course,--that the thing so offered becomes absolutely valueless
by the offer,--that the woman who can make it has put herself out
of court by her own abandonment of the privileges due to her as a
woman,--that stern rebuke and even expressed contempt are justified
by such conduct,--and that the fairest beauty and most alluring
charms of feminine grace should lose their attraction when thus
tendered openly in the market. No doubt such is our theory as to love
and love-making. But the ac