Bessie divined its meaning, and gave a gasp of agony, but did not speak. Not so, young Mr. Million. 'Good Heavens!' he cried, with a guilty look which he could not hide from George's keen gaze. 'George, what has happened?' George looked at young Mr. Million's outstretched hand, and rejected it disdainfully and with absolute contempt. Then looked at the flowers on the table--hothouse flowers he knew they were--then into Bessie's face, which seemed as if it were carved out of gray-white stone, so fixed did it grow in his gaze--then at the earrings in her ears: and a bitter, bitter smile came to his lips--a smile it was pity to see there. 'These are pretty flowers,' he said, raising them from the table; in the intensity of his passion his fingers closed upon the blooming things, and in a moment more he would have crushed them--but he restrained himself in time, and let them drop from his strongly-veined hand. 'I beg pardon,' he said, 'they are not mine. Even if they belong to you--which they do, of course--I can have no claim on them now.' He addressed himself to Bessie, but she did not answer him. She had never seen in his face what she saw now, and she knew that it was the doom of her love and his. 'I have come to return you something,' he said, and took from his breast a pretty silk purse. It was hung round his neck by a piece of black silk cord, and he did not disengage it readily. It almost seemed as if it wished not to be taken from its resting-place. As he held it in his hand, he knew that his life's happiness was in it, and that he was about to relinquish it. And as he held it, there came to Bessie's mind the words he had spoken only the night before: 'See here, heart's-treasure,' he had said, 'here is the purse you worked for me, round my neck. It shall never leave me--it rests upon my heart. The pretty little beads! How I love them! I shall kiss every piece of gold I put in it, and shall think I am kissing you, as I do now, dear, dearest, best!' 'Take it,' George said now. She held out her hand mechanically, and as George touched her cold fingers he shivered. Both knew what this giving and taking meant. It meant that all was over between them. Old Ben Sparrow had come into the room, and had witnessed the scene in quiet amazement; he did not see his way to the remotest understanding of what had passed. But he saw Bessie's suffering, and he moved to her side. When the purse was in her hand he touched her, but she repulsed him gently. Some sense of what was due to herself in the presence of young Mr. Million came to her, and her womanly pride at George's rejection of her in the presence of another man came to her also, and gave her strength for a while. George's hand was on the door, when young Mr. Million, who was deeply mortified at George's manner towards himself, and who at the same time thought it would be a gallant move to champion Bessie's cause, laid his hand on George's sleeve, and said: