"Yet you must," said she. "No man with a career before him should marry a recluse, and I am that, whatever else I may or may not be. I would be doing a second ineffaceable wrong if I took advantage of your generous impulse and bound you to a fate that in less than two months would be intolerably irksome to one of your temperament." "Now you do not know me," he protested. But she heeded neither his words nor his pleading look. "I know human nature," she avowed, "and if I do not mingle much with the world I know the passions that sway it. I can never be the wife of any man, Mr. Etheridge, much less of one so generous and so self-forgetting as yourself." "Do you--are you certain?" he asked. "Certain." "Then I have not succeeded in raising one throb of interest in your breast?" She opened her lips and his heart stood still for her answer, but she closed them again and remained standing so long with her hands locked together and her face downcast, that his hopes revived again, and he was about to put in another plea for her hand when she looked up and said firmly: "I think you ought to know that my heart does not respond to your suit. It may make any disappointment which you feel less lasting." He uttered a low exclamation and stepped back. "I beg your pardon," said he, "I ought not to have annoyed you. You will forget my folly, I hope." "Do you forget it!" cried she; but her lips trembled and he saw it. "Hermione! Hermione!" he murmured, and was down at her feet before she could prevent it. "Oh, how I love you!" he breathed, and kissed her hand wildly, passionately. XII. HOW MUCH DID IT MEAN? Frank Etheridge left the presence of Hermione Cavanagh, carrying with him an indelible impression of her slender, white-robed figure and pallid, passion-drawn face. There was such tragedy in the latter, that he shuddered at its memory, and stopped before he reached the gate to ask himself if the feeling she displayed was for him or another. If for another, then was that other Dr. Sellick, and as the name formed itself in his thoughts, he felt the dark cloud of jealousy creep over his mind, obscuring the past and making dangerous the future. "How can I know," thought he, "how can I know?" and just as the second repetition passed his lips, he heard a soft step near him, and, looking up, saw the gentle Emma watering her flowers. To gain her side was his first impulse. To obtain her confidence the second. Taking the heavy watering-pot from her hand, he poured its contents on the rose-bush she was tending, and then setting it down, said quietly: "I have just made your sister very unhappy, Miss Cavanagh." She started and her soft eyes showed the shadow of an alarm. "I thought you were her friend," she said. He drew her around the corner of the house towards the poplar trees. "Had I been only that," he avowed, "I might have spared her pain, but I am more than that, Miss Cavanagh, I am her lover."