“You cannot despise me more than I despise myself, for I see it now just as you do, and I must have been an idiot, or crazy. You will loathe me always, of course, and I cannot blame you; but remember. I did not mean it for love, or think to stay with you. I do not love you _that way_; such a thing would be impossible, and I would not marry you now for a thousand times the money.” She had used her last and heaviest weapon, and without a glance at him turned to go from the room, but he would not suffer her to leave him thus. Over him, too, as she talked, a curious change had come, for he saw the transformation taking place and knew he was losing the sweet, old-fashioned, guileless-child, who had been so dear to him. She was leaving him, forever, and in her place there stood a full-fledged woman, rife with a woman’s instincts, quivering with passion, and burning with resentment and anger, that he had not at once understood her meaning just as she understood it. How her words,—“I do not love you that way; such a thing is impossible; and I would not marry you now for a thousand times the money,” rang through his ears, and burned themselves into his memory to be recalled afterward, with such bitter pain as he had never known. He did not quite like this impetuous assertion of the impossibility of loving him. It grated upon him with a sense of something lost. He must stand well with Rossie, though her love _that way_, as she expressed it, was something he had never dreamed of as possible. “Rossie,” be said, putting out his arm to detain her, “you must not go from me feeling as you do now. You have done nothing for which you need to blush, because you had no bad intent, and the motive is what exalts or condemns the act. Sit here by me. I wish to talk with you.”