‘Why should I make believe,’ said Oswald; ‘or why should you wonder? What should I come here for but to see you? to watch over you at a distance, and--I confess it, though it may seem selfish--to speak to you when I could find an opportunity----’ ‘Indeed, indeed!’ she said, clasping her hands, ‘you ought not--you must not! I have said so before.’ ‘Do you think it likely,’ said Oswald, with fine seriousness, ‘that I should have followed you like your shadow for so long, and leave off all at once, without explanation, without reason? Agnes, here we are safe and quite out of the reach of interruption. Here you may listen to me without shocking--yourself, or anyone. Hear me first. The poorest beggar in the street you will give a hearing to, why not to me? Let me tell you everything. Let me ask you what I _must_ ask--let me know my fate.’ ‘Mr. Meredith,’ she said, speaking very low and quickly, ‘these are not words to be used to me. I--I do not know you----’ ‘Not know me!’ he repeated with ingenuous wonder. ‘I mean--of course I have seen you a great many times. Of course I--but I ought not to know you,’ she went on, with a little vehemence. ‘I have--nothing to do with you.’ ‘How unkind, how unkind you are!’ This reproach silenced her. She gave him a hasty look, with a sudden, half-supplicating movement of her hands. ‘When a man loves a woman,’ said Oswald, with anxious art, ‘they are almost always strangers to each other. Do you blame him if he takes every means to introduce himself, to try to get her to know him, to believe in him, to reply to him? You are not at home; not in circumstances to allow this. What could I do? I would have brought my mother; but I told you what happened to us, and the trouble my mother is in. And, besides, pardon me if I had a hope that you, who were not a common girl like others, would understand me, would let me speak without all the vulgar preliminaries----. We are not like two nobodies, two butterflies of whom no one knows anything,’ he said, with a vague flourish of trumpets. Agnes made him no reply; she was without words. Indeed, she was a little overawed by this explanation--‘not like two nobodies, of whom no one knows anything.’ Who was he? what had he done to lift him to the rank of those whom other people knew?