‘No!’ he said; ‘and I don’t want to be like brother and sister. I am so fond of you, I don’t know what to say. Oh, Cara! don’t be so quiet as if it didn’t matter. I shall be well off, able to keep a wife.’ ‘A wife?--that is a new idea,’ she said, bewildered; ‘but you are too young, Roger.’ ‘Will you come with me, Cara?’ he cried, passing over, scarcely hearing, in his emotion, the surprise yet indifference of this question. ‘Oh, Cara! don’t say no without thinking! I will wait if you like--say a year or two years. I shall not mind. I would rather wait fifty years for you than have anyone else, Cara. Only say you will come with me, or even to me, and I shall not mind.’ Cara sat quite upright in her chair. She threw her white shawl off in her excitement. ‘_Me?_’ she said; ‘me?’ (That fine point of grammar often settles itself summarily in excitement, and on the wrong side.) ‘You must be dreaming,’ she said; ‘or am I dreaming, or what has happened? I don’t know what you mean.’ He stumbled up to his feet red as the glow of the fire which had scorched him, poor boy, as if his unrequited passion was not enough. ‘If I am dreaming!’ he said, in the sharp sting of his downfall, ‘it is you who have made me dream.’ ‘I?’ said Cara, in her surprise (the grammar coming right as the crisis got over); ‘what have I done? I don’t understand at all. I am not unkind. If there was anything I could do to please you, I would do it.’ ‘To please me, Cara?’ he cried, sinking again into submission. ‘To make me happy, that is what you can do, if you like. Don’t say no all at once; think of it at least; the hardest-hearted might do that.’ ‘I am not hard-hearted,’ she said. ‘I begin to see what it is. We have both made a mistake, Roger. I never thought _this_ was what you were thinking; and you have deceived yourself, supposing I knew. I am very, very sorry. I will do anything--else----’ ‘I don’t want anything else,’ he said, sullenly. He turned his back upon her in the gloom and blackness of his disappointment. ‘What else is there between young people like us,’ he said, bitterly. ‘My mother always says so, and she ought to know. I have heard often enough of girls leading men on--enticing them to make fools of themselves--and I see it is true now. But I never thought it of you, Cara. Whatever others did, I thought you were one by yourself, and nobody like you. But I see now you are just like the rest. What good does it do you to make a fellow unhappy--to break his heart?’ Here poor Roger’s voice faltered, the true feeling in him struggling against the vulgar fibre which extremity revealed. ‘And all your smiling and looking sweet, was it all for nothing?’ he said--‘all meaning nothing! You would have done just the same for anybody else! What good does it do you? for there’s nobody here to see how you have made a laughing-stock of me.’ ‘Have I made a laughing-stock of you? I am more ready to cry than to laugh,’ said Cara, indignantly, yet with quivering lip.