th yourself. Your bread would choke me. Your roof would
not shelter me. Your good things would be poison to
me,--unless you were here to make me feel that they were
yours also as well as mine. If you mean to insist on the
severity of your order, you will have to get rid of me
altogether. I shall then have come across two men of which
I do not know whether to wonder most at the baseness of
the one or the cruelty of the other. In that case I can
only return to my mother. In that case you will not, I
think, care much what may become of me; but as I shall
still bear your name, it is, I suppose, proper that you
should know where I purpose living.

But, dear George, dearest George,--I wish you could know
how much dearer to me in spite of your cruelty than all
the world besides,--I cannot even yet bring myself to
believe that we can for ever be separated. Dear George,
endeavour to think how small has been my offence and
how tremendous is the punishment which you propose. The
offence is so small that I will not let myself down by
asking your pardon. Had you said a word sitting beside me,
even a word of anger, then I could have done so. I think I
could have made you believe how altogether accidental it
had been. But I will not do so now. I should aggravate
my own fault till it would appear to you that I had done
something of which I ought to be ashamed, and which
perhaps you ought not to forgive. I have done nothing of
which I am ashamed, and nothing certainly which you ought
even to think it necessary to pardon.

When she had got so far she sat for a while thinking whether she
would or would not tell him of the cause and the manner of her
silence. Should she refer him to his sister, who understood so well
how that silence had been produced? Should she explain to him that
she had in the first case hesitated to tell him her story because
her story had been so like to his own? But as she thought of it all,
she declared to herself that were she to do so she would in truth
condescend to ask his pardon. What she required of him was that he
should acknowledge her nature, her character, her truth to be such
that he had made a grievous mistake in attributing to her aught that
was a just cause of anger. "You stupid girl, you foolish girl, to
have given yourself and me such cause for discomfort!" That he should
have said to her, with his arm round her