ould have stayed at home this
morning, and kept my confidences to myself. Yet I wanted to tell you.
So I came, thinking, believing, I should receive sympathy from you;
and now what have I got? Only harsh and cruel words! If I had known--"

"Clarissa!"

"Yes! If any one had told me you would so treat me, I
should--should--"

It is this supreme moment she chooses to burst out crying; and she
cries heartily (by which I mean that she gives way to grief of the
most vehement and agonized description) for at least five minutes,
without a cessation, making her lament openly, and in a carefully
unreserved fashion, intended to reduce his heart to water. And not in
vain is _her_ "weak endeavor."

Sir James, when the first sob falls upon his ear, turns from her, and,
as though unable to endure the sound, deliberately walks away from her
down the garden path.

When he gets quite to the end of it, however, and knows the next turn
will hide him from sight of her tears or sound of her woe, he
hesitates, then is lost, and finally coming back again to where she is
standing, hidden by a cambric handkerchief, lays his hand upon her
arm. At his touch her sobs increase.

"Don't do that!" he says, so roughly that she knows his heart is
bleeding. "Do you hear me, Clarissa? Stop crying. It isn't doing you
any good, and it is driving me mad. What has happened?--what is making
you so unhappy?"

"_You_ are," says Miss Peyton, with a final sob, and a whole octave of
reproach in her voice. "Anything so unkind I never knew. And just when
I had come all the way over here to tell you what I would tell nobody
else except papa! There was a time, Jim" (with a soft but upbraiding
glance), "when you would have been sweet and kind and good to me on an
occasion like this."

She moves a step nearer to him, and lays her hand--the little, warm,
pulsing hand he loves so passionately--upon his arm. Her glance is
half offended, half beseeching: Scrope's strength of will gives way,
and, metaphorically speaking, he lays himself at her feet.

"If I have been uncivil to you, forgive me," he says, taking her hand
from his arm, and holding it closely in his own. "You do not know; you
cannot understand; and I am glad you do not. Be happy! There is no
substantial reason why you should not extract from life every sweet it
can afford: you are young, the world is before you, and the love you
desire is yours. Dry your eyes, Clarissa: your tears pierce my heart."