quite worth your while to buy me off. Come, therefore; buy me!"
There was a point indeed at which such flights had to drop again--the
point of an unreadiness to name, when it came to that, the purchasing
medium. It wouldn't certainly be anything so gross as money, and the
matter accordingly remained rather vague, all the more that _she_ was not
a bad girl. It wasn't for any such reason as might have aggravated a
mere minx that she often hoped he would again bring Cissy. The
difficulty of this, however, was constantly present to her, for the kind
of communion to which Cocker's so richly ministered rested on the fact
that Cissy and he were so often in different places. She knew by this
time all the places--Suchbury, Monkhouse, Whiteroy, Finches--and even how
the parties on these occasions were composed; but her subtlety found ways
to make her knowledge fairly protect and promote their keeping, as she
had heard Mrs. Jordan say, in touch. So, when he actually sometimes
smiled as if he really felt the awkwardness of giving her again one of
the same old addresses, all her being went out in the desire--which her
face must have expressed--that he should recognise her forbearance to
criticise as one of the finest tenderest sacrifices a woman had ever made
for love.

CHAPTER XII

She was occasionally worried, however this might be, by the impression
that these sacrifices, great as they were, were nothing to those that his
own passion had imposed; if indeed it was not rather the passion of his
confederate, which had caught him up and was whirling him round like a
great steam-wheel. He was at any rate in the strong grip of a dizzy
splendid fate; the wild wind of his life blew him straight before it.
Didn't she catch in his face at times, even through his smile and his
happy habit, the gleam of that pale glare with which a bewildered victim
appeals, as he passes, to some pair of pitying eyes? He perhaps didn't
even himself know how scared he was; but _she_ knew. They were in
danger, they were in danger, Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen: it beat
every novel in the shop. She thought of Mr. Mudge and his safe
sentiment; she thought of herself and blushed even more for her tepid
response to it. It was a comfort to her at such moments to feel that in
another relation--a relation supplying that affinity with her nature that
Mr. Mudge, deluded creature, would never supply--she should have been no
more tepid than her lad