ng.

"What have you to offer me in exchange for all you ask me to give? A
heart filled with thoughts of another! No more!----"

"If you persist in thinking----"

"Why should I not think it? When I tell you there is danger of my hating
you, as your wife might--perhaps--hate you--your first thought is for
her! 'You think then that she hates me'?" (She imitates the anxiety of
his tone with angry truthfulness.) "Not one word of horror at the
thought that I might hate you six months hence."

"Perhaps I did not believe you would," says he, with some embarrassment.

"Ah! That is so like a man! You think, don't you, that you were made to
be loved? There, go! Leave me!"

He would have spoken to her again, but she rejects the idea with such
bitterness that he is necessarily silent. She has covered her face with
her hands. Presently she is alone.

CHAPTER XLVII.

"But there are griefs, ay, griefs as deep;
The friendship turned to hate.
And deeper still, and deeper still
Repentance come too late, too late!"

Joyce, on the whole, had not enjoyed last night's dance at the Court.
Barbara had been there, and she had gone home with her and Monkton after
it, and on waking this morning a sense of unreality, of dissatisfaction,
is all that comes to her. No pleasant flavor is on her mental palate;
there is only a vague feeling of failure and a dislike to looking into
things--to analyze matters as they stand.

Yet where the failure came in she would have found it difficult to
explain even to herself. Everybody, so far as she was concerned, had
behaved perfectly; that is, as she, if she had been compelled to say it
out loud, would have desired them to behave. Mr. Beauclerk had been
polite enough; not too polite; and Lady Baltimore had made a great deal
of her, and Barbara had said she looked lovely, and Freddy had said
something, oh! absurd of course, and not worth repeating, but still
flattering; and those men from the barracks at Clonbree had been a
perfect nuisance, they were so pressing with their horrid attentions,
and so eager to get a dance. And Mr. Dysart----

Well? That fault could not be laid to his charge, therefore, of course,
he was all that could be desired. He was circumspect to the last degree.
He had not been pressing with his attentions; he had, indeed, been so
kind and nice that he had only asked her for one dance, and during the
short quarter of an hour that that took to get throug