self.

'No, Miss; no, dear!' answered she, plainly thinking that I was a little
wrong in my head.

There could be no doubt it was a trick of the imagination, and yet to this
hour I could recognise that clear stern voice among a thousand, were it to
speak again.

Jaded after a night of broken sleep and much agitation, I was summoned next
morning to my uncle's room.

He received me _oddly_, I thought. His manner had changed, and made an
uncomfortable impression upon me. He was gentle, kind, smiling, submissive,
as usual; but it seemed to me that he experienced henceforth toward me the
same half-superstitous repulsion which I had always felt from him. Dream,
or voice, or vision--which had done it? There seemed to be an unconscious
antipathy and fear. When he thought I was not looking, his eyes were
sometimes grimly fixed for a moment upon me. When I looked at him, his eyes
were upon the book before him; and when he spoke, a person not heeding what
he uttered would have fancied that he was reading aloud from it.

There was nothing tangible but this shrinking from the encounter of our
eyes. I said he was kind as usual. He was even more so. But there was this
new sign of our silently repellant natures. Dislike it could not be. He
knew I longed to serve him. Was it shame? Was there not a shade of horror
in it?

'I have not slept,' said he. 'For me the night has passed in thought, and
the fruit of it is this--I _cannot_, Maud, accept your noble offer.'

'I am _very_ sorry,' exclaimed I, in all honesty.

'I know it, my dear niece, and appreciate your goodness; but there are
many reasons--none of them, I trust, ignoble--and which together render
it impossible. No. It would be misunderstood--my honour shall not be
impugned.'

'But, sir, that could not be; you have never proposed it. It would be all,
from first to last, _my_ doing.'

'True, dear Maud, but I know, alas! more of this evil and slanderous world
than your happy inexperience can do. Who will receive our testimony?
None--no, not one. The difficulty--the insuperable moral difficulty is
this--that I should expose myself to the plausible imputation of having
worked upon you, unduly, for this end; and more, that I could not hold
myself quite free from blame. It is your voluntary goodness, Maud. But you
are young, inexperienced; and it is, I hold it, my duty to stand between
you and any dealing with your property at so unripe an age. Some people may
call this Quixo