"Can you think I would stay?" he replied, vehemently. "Oh! Daisy, tempt me not to call you cold and heartless, to say those things which a lifetime vainly repents and never effaces. Is it because I have passed through a year of the hardest self-subjection ever imposed on mortal; through a year of looks restrained, words hushed, emotions repressed; a year of fever and torment endured, that not a cloud might come over the serenity of your peace--is it for this, Daisy, that you think my heart and my blood so cold as to wish me to stay; as not to see that between complete union or utter separation there can now be no medium?" His look sought mine with a troubled glance; there was fever in his accent, and pain in the half smile with which he spoke. "But why go so soon?" I asked, in a low tone. "Why? Daisy, you ask why? Because endurance has reached her utmost limits, and cannot pass them; because the rest is an abyss over which not even a poor plank stretches; because the thing I have delayed months must be done now or never: because, hard as is your absence, your constant presence is something still harder to bear." He spoke with an ill-subdued irritation I knew not how to soothe. "Cornelius!" I said in my gentlest accents, "if you would but stay and be calm." "Stay and be calm!" he replied impetuously, and pacing the room with hasty steps, that ever came back to me; "why, I have been the calmest of calm men! When, one after another, they attempted to woo and win under my very eyes the only girl for whom I cared, she whom I looked on as my future wife; as the secret betrothed of my heart: when, to add taunt to taunt, as if I were not flesh and blood like them; as if I had not known you more years than they had known you weeks; loved you, when they cared not if you existed, they allowed me with insolent unconsciousness to behold it all, did I not subdue the secret wrath which trembled in every fibre of my being? What more would you have me do? Wait to see in the possession and enjoyment of one more fortunate than the rest, that which should have been my property and my joy; whilst I looked on, a robbed father, a friend forsaken, a lover betrayed, and behold my child, companion, friend and mistress the prize of a stranger!" "Do you think then," he added, stopping short, and speaking with calmer and deeper indignation, "do you think then that I have severed you from the lover of your youth, guarded you from my own friends, watched over you as a miser over his gold, suspected every man who looked at you, sickened at the thought, 'Is it now I am to be robbed?' breathed and lived again at the reply, 'Not yet'--to stay and wait until some other comes and reaps the fruit of all my vain watchfulness."