"No, it was my pride. Clara, in my better mind I loved you all along. How could I help admiring your truth and courage and devotion to your father? Although I own that you were very bitter against me, yet, if I had only used the proper means, I might have got the better of it. If I had told you all my story, you would have pitied more even than condemned me. But my pride forbade, and I made the common mistake of regarding you as a child, because you were that in years. I forgot to allow for the forcing powers of grief. Even now, pulled down as I am, and humbled by the wisdom of Heaven, I cannot tell you my strange history without the acutest pain." "Then I am sure, uncle, I will never let you do it." "Yes, it is my duty, and the sooner done the better. Rescued though I am, for the present, by your wonderful courage and skill, I feel that one more blow, even a slight one now, and time for me is ended. But if it were God’s will to cut me off to-morrow, I should die in happiness, having made my peace, and won your kind forgiveness." "You shall not tell me now at any rate. And I won’t have you talk so, uncle. Mind, I am head-nurse still. Now come and see how lovely the ranunculus are getting." I began to wheel him over the grass and gather flowers (which "he played with like a child), to change, if possible, the current of his thoughts. Stupid thing! I took the wrong way to do it. "Oh, uncle dear! you will laugh at me, and say I am as bad as ever; but as soon as you get better I want to be off again, kind and good as you are to me." He trembled so violently, that I feared the chair would be upset. "What, Clara, can’t you live with me even now? Everything shall be yours, as it ought to be. I will never meddle with you in any way, but keep to some lonely corner, and not see you very often. Oh, Clara! dear Clara! don’t go away! You know I am quite helpless, and I can’t live long, and you are all in all to me, and I am so proud of you, darling! But it is not for myself I care. I cannot tell, much less can you, what mischief may be done if you leave this house again. That low, crafty woman will be back again directly--she who made cowards of all the household, and acted the coward herself, who left me to die in my lonely bed, while she took all my keys. If her treachery succeeds, I shall rise from my grave. And I know she will poison me yet, if she gets the chance, and can make anything by it." It was the first time he had spoken to me of Mrs. Daldy, and I was amazed at his bitterness, for I had heard of no quarrel between them. What on earth did it mean? "Don’t go, Clara!" he implored me, with the cold sweat on his forehead, and every line in his poor thin face a-quivering. "Don’t go, my darling, blessed Clara! I have had none to love for years and years, and to love you is so sweet! If you go I must die at once, and, worse than that, die wretched in the knowledge that you will be robbed."