"No? And yet you ask a woman for whom you scarcely bear a passing affection to run away with you, to defy public opinion for your sake, and so forth. You should advise her to count the world well lost for love--such love as yours! You pour every bit of the old rubbish into one's ears, and yet--" She stops abruptly. A very storm of anger and grief and despair is shaking her to her heart's core. "Well?" says he, still frowning. "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----