you unable to perceive how that redounds to my discredit? You loved me, you have ceased to love me. In other words you charge me with incapacity to sustain a woman's love. You accuse me of inspiring a miserable passion that cannot last a lifetime! You let the world see that I am a man to be aimed at for a temporary mark! And simply because I happen to be in your neighbourhood at an age when a young woman is impressionable! You make a public example of me as a for whom women may have a caprice, but that is all; he cannot enchain them; he fascinates passingly; they fall off. Is it just, for me to be taken up and cast down at your will? Reflect on that scandal! Shadows? Why, a man's shadow is faithful to him at least. What are women? There is not a comparison in nature that does not tower above them! not one that does not hoot at them! I, throughout my life, guided by absolute deference to their weakness — paying them politeness, courtesy — whatever I touch I am happy in, except when I touch women! How is it? What is the mystery? Some monstrous explanation must exist. What can it be? I am favoured by fortune from my birth until I enter into relations with women. But will you be so good as to account for it in your defence of them? Oh! were the relations dishonourable, it would be quite another matter. Then they… I could recount… I disdain to chronicle such victories. Quite another matter. But they are flies, and I am something more stable. They are flies. I look beyond the day; I owe a duty to my line. They are flies. I foresee it, I shall be crossed in my fate so long as I fail to shun them — flies! Not merely born for the day, I maintain that they are spiritually ephemeral — Well, my opinion of your sex is directly traceable to you. You may alter it, or fling another of us men out on the world with the old bitter experience. Consider this, that it is on your head if my ideal of women is wrecked. It rests with you to restore it. I love you. I discover that you are the one woman I have always loved. I come to you, I sue you, and suddenly — you have changed! 'I have changed: I am not the same. What can it mean? 'I cannot marry: I love no one. And you say you do not know what love is — avowing in the same breath that you did love me! Am I the empty dream? My hand, heart, fortune, name, are yours, at your feet; you kick them hence. I am here — you reject me. But why, for what mortal reason am I here other than my faith in your love? You drew me to you, to repel me, and have a wretched revenge.'
'You know it is not that, Sir Willoughby.'
'Have you any possible suspicion that I am still entangled, not, as I assure you I am, perfectly free in fact and in honour?'
'It is not that.'
'Name it; for you see your power. Would you have me kneel to you, madam?'
'Oh, no; it would complete my grief.'
'You feel grief? Then you believe in my affection, and you hurl it away. I have no doubt that as a poetess you would say, love is eternal. And you have loved me. And you tell me you love me no more. You are not very logical, L?titia Dale.'
'Poetesses rarely are: if I am one, which I little pretend to be for writing silly verses. I have passed out of that delusion, with the rest.'
'You shall not wrong those dear old days, L?titia. I see them now; when I rode by your cottage and you were at your window, pen in hand, your hair straying over your forehead. Romantic, yes; not foolish. Why were you foolish in thinking of me? Some day I will commission an artist to paint me that portrait of you from my description. And I remember when we first whispered… I remember your trembling. You have forgotten — I remember. I remember our meeting in the park on the path to church. I remember the heavenly morning of my return from my travels, and the same L?titia meeting me, stedfast and unchangeable. Could I ever forget? Those are ineradicable scenes; pictures of my youth, interwound with me. I may say, that as I recede from them, I dwell on them the more. Tell me, L?titia, was there not a certain prophecy of your father's concerning us two? I fancy I heard of one. There was one.'
'He was an invalid. Elderly people nurse illusions.'
'Ask yourself L?titia, who is the obstacle to the fulfilment of his prediction? — truth, if ever a truth was foreseen on earth. You have not changed so far that you would feel no pleasure in gratifying him? I go to him to- morrow morning with the first light.'
'You will compel me to follow, and undeceive him.'
'Do so, and I denounce an unworthy affection you are ashamed to avow.'
'That would be idle, though it would be base.'
'Proof of love, then! For no one but you should it be done, and no one but you dare accuse me of a baseness.'
'Sir Willoughby, you will let my father die in peace.'
'He and I together will contrive to persuade you.'
'You tempt me to imagine that you want a wife at any cost.'
'You, L?titia, you.'
'I am tired,' she said. 'It is late, I would rather not hear more. I am sorry if I have caused you pain. I suppose you to have spoken with candour. I defend neither my sex nor myself. I can only say I am a woman as good as dead: happy to be made happy in my way, but so little alive that I cannot realize any other way. As for love, I am thankful to have broken a spell. You have a younger woman in your mind; I am an old one: I have no ambition and no warmth. My utmost prayer is to float on the stream — a purely physical desire of life: I have no strength to swim. Such a woman is not the wife for you, Sir Willoughby. Good night.'
'One final word. Weigh it. Express no conventional regrets. Resolutely you refuse?'
'Resolutely I do.'
'You refuse?'
'Yes.'
'I have sacrificed my pride for nothing! You refuse?'
'Yes.'
'Humbled myself! And this is the answer! You do refuse?'
'I do.'
'Good night, L?titia Dale.'
He gave her passage.
'Good night, Sir Willoughby.'
'I am in your power,' he said, in a voice between supplication and menace that laid a claw on her, and she turned and replied:
'You will not be betrayed.'
'I can trust you…?'
'I go home to-morrow before breakfast.'
'Permit me to escort you upstairs.'
'If you please: but I see no one here either to-night or tomorrow.'
'It is for the privilege of seeing the last of you.'
They withdrew.
Young Crossjay listened to the drumming of his head. Somewhere in or over the cavity a drummer rattled tremendously.
Sir Willoughby's laboratory door shut with a slam.
Crossjay tumbled himself off the ottoman. He stole up to the unclosed drawing-room door, and peeped. Never was a boy more thoroughly awakened. His object was to get out of the house and go through the night avoiding everything human, for he was big with information of a character that he knew to be of the nature of gunpowder, and he feared to explode. He crossed the hall. In the passage to the scullery he ran against Colonel De Craye.
'So there you are,' said the colonel, 'I've been hunting you.'
Crossjay related that his bedroom door was locked and the key gone, and Sir Willoughby sitting up in the laboratory.
Colonel De Craye took the boy to his own room, where Crossjay lay on a sofa, comfortably covered over and snug in a swelling pillow; but he was restless; he wanted to speak, to bellow, to cry; and he bounced round to his left side, and bounced to his right, not knowing what to think, except that there was treason to his adored Miss Middleton.
'Why, my lad, you're not half a campaigner,' the colonel called out to him; attributing his uneasiness to the material discomfort of the sofa: and Crossjay had to swallow the taunt, bitter though it was. A dim sentiment of impropriety in unburdening his overcharged mind on the subject of Miss Middleton to Colonel De Craye restrained
