“Answerable? May I ask to whom?” I said, as coldly as I could, though I began to feel a strange joy—yes, joy just after my despair, therefore all the keener by contrast. Oh, my father, what a paltry nature is mine to love another when I have but just lost you! “There is no one that has any power over me, no one who can or will ask or care what has become of me,” I said, as he did not speak for some moments. “There is,” he said. “That is absurd; there is _not_,” I asseverated. “There is,” he said,—“Almighty God!” He drew my hand through his arm, and we walked silently towards the house. I was wondering why I had shuddered at his sudden mention of the Deity; I was frightened to realise that his influence had even greater power over me than I thought. “You are my sacred charge,” he said, in the same serious voice. What a voice he has—so deep, yet so mellow! “Do what you may, I shall watch over you till I die.” “If you can find me,” I cried; for the battle to resist him against a strong inclination I felt to tell him I was his slave, to do as he pleased with, was exciting me to wildness. “Perhaps I shall die or disappear!” “If I thought one thing, I should be the one to disappear; at least, you should never be troubled with the sight of me again,” he said, stopping when we came to an open place in the road, dropping my hand, and turning so that he could see my face plainly in the moonlight. “And I must really now, once for all, ask you to answer me a plain question, with truth, absolute truth. It is my duty to ask, and your duty to reply.” “Well?” I said, nerving myself as if for some process of torture, dreading, fearing I should give away suddenly, and shame myself for ever, beyond repair, beyond recall. “It is a plain question, and I only want a plain Yes or No,” he went on. “Can you love me as a husband?” I stood still, I gasped. Terror! I had to tell the truth, and that truth was horrible. Suddenly I bethought me how to be true both to myself and to him. “It must be plain Yes or plain No?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Then, _No_!” I cried, emphatically. He thrust his hands into his pockets, drew a deep sigh, and stared at me. His face was in the shadow: I could not see it; but I _felt_ his eyes fixed upon me. “Thank you for your frankness,” he said, just when the silence was getting unendurable, and I dreaded giving way and flinging myself at his knees, or something equally disgraceful. Oh, the hard, hard fight it was to keep cool, silent! “Then the dream is over,” he went on, more to himself than to me, beginning to walk along the road again. “I might have known it without asking you, child; but it is best to kill a delusion right out, at once.” “What delusion?” I asked. “The delusion that you, or, for the matter of that, any woman, could care to be the wife of a man so totally devoid of interest and charm as myself,” he said, bitterly. “Thank heaven! it will never come in my way to ask any woman that question again.”