"I am here to-day, Miss Lloyd," he said at last, "to make a very painful confession, and I must ask your forgiveness if, in the course of it, I am compelled to speak more plainly than under other circumstances I should venture to do. Some three months ago I entered the service of Sir Thomas Dudgeon as his secretary. At that time I was doing nothing, or next to nothing: I was a poor man; the situation was thrown in my way, and I accepted it. But I accepted it, Miss Lloyd, not for the sake of the salary or emoluments attached to the position, but simply in order that by its means I might be brought near to you, and have an opportunity of making your acquaintance. It had been hinted to me that the only mode by which I could recoup my fortunes was by marrying an heiress. I was told that you were an heiress, and that there was just a faint possibility that I might succeed in winning your hand." "Your confession, sir, has at least the merit of frankness," said Eleanor, with a quivering lip. "Its frankness is the only merit it can lay claim to. I came to Stammars, Miss Lloyd, and I made your acquaintance. From that moment I was a changed man. Whatever mercenary motives, whatever ignoble ends, may have held possession of me before, they all vanished, utterly and for ever, in that first hour of our meeting. I felt and knew only that I loved you. In that love--so different from anything I had ever felt before--lay a subtle alchemy, that had the power of transfusing into something finer and purer everything base that it touched. It has refined and purified me: it has given to my hopes and inspirations a different aim: it has taught me to look at life and its duties with altogether different eyes." He paused for a moment. Eleanor sat without speaking. What, indeed, could she say? But she had never loved him better than at that moment. "A fortnight ago," resumed Gerald, "carried away by the impulse of the moment, and my own long-suppressed feelings, I said certain words to you which I ought not to have said--at least, not till after I had told you what I am telling you to-day, and not till I knew that I was forgiven. I am here to-day, Miss Lloyd, to crave your pardon for having given utterance to those words, and to ask you to look upon them as if they had never been said." "Why need he do that?" whispered Eleanor in her heart. "After the confession which I have just made as to the motives which first led me to become an inmate of this house, I dare hardly hope ever to attain again to that position in your regards which I flattered myself--wrongly enough, perhaps--was mine but a little while ago. How greatly I regret having forfeited that position I should fail to tell you in any words. But I may, perhaps, hope that my candour will meet with sufficient recognition at your hands to induce you to overlook all that has gone before, and to treat me in time to come, not as an utter stranger, but as one who----" He paused, at a loss for words.