When he gets quite to the end of it, however, and knows the next turn will hide him from sight of her tears or sound of her woe, he hesitates, then is lost, and finally coming back again to where she is standing, hidden by a cambric handkerchief, lays his hand upon her arm. At his touch her sobs increase. "Don't do that!" he says, so roughly that she knows his heart is bleeding. "Do you hear me, Clarissa? Stop crying. It isn't doing you any good, and it is driving me mad. What has happened?--what is making you so unhappy?" "_You_ are," says Miss Peyton, with a final sob, and a whole octave of reproach in her voice. "Anything so unkind I never knew. And just when I had come all the way over here to tell you what I would tell nobody else except papa! There was a time, Jim" (with a soft but upbraiding glance), "when you would have been sweet and kind and good to me on an occasion like this." She moves a step nearer to him, and lays her hand--the little, warm, pulsing hand he loves so passionately--upon his arm. Her glance is half offended, half beseeching: Scrope's strength of will gives way, and, metaphorically speaking, he lays himself at her feet. "If I have been uncivil to you, forgive me," he says, taking her hand from his arm, and holding it closely in his own. "You do not know; you cannot understand; and I am glad you do not. Be happy! There is no substantial reason why you should not extract from life every sweet it can afford: you are young, the world is before you, and the love you desire is yours. Dry your eyes, Clarissa: your tears pierce my heart." He has quite regained his self-control by this time, and having conquered emotion, speaks dispassionately. Clarissa, as he has said, does not understand the terrible struggle it costs him to utter these words in an ordinary tone, and with a face which, if still pale, betrays no mental excitement. She smiles. Her tears vanish. She sighs contentedly, and moves the hand that rests in his. "I am so glad we are friends again," she says. "And now tell me why you were so horrid at first: you might just as well have begun as you have ended: it would have saved trouble and time, and" (reproachfully) "all my tears." "Perhaps I value you so highly that I hate the thought of losing you," says Scrope, palliating the ugliness of his conduct as best he may. His voice is very earnest. "How fond you are of me!" says Miss Peyton, with some wonder and much pleasure. To this he finds it impossible to make any answer. "Whenever I wish I had had a brother, I always think of you," goes on she, pleasantly, "you are so--so--quiet, and your scoldings so half-hearted. Now, even though rather late, wish me joy."