"Dear child, why be tragic?" he said--"Life is such a pleasant thing and holds so much for both of us! I shall always love you--if you're good!" and he laughed, pleasantly--"and you can always love ME--if you like! But I cannot marry you--I have never thought of such a thing! Marriage would not suit me at all. I know, of course, what YOU would like. You would like a grand wedding with lots of millinery and presents, and then a honeymoon at your old Briar Farm--in fact, I daresay you'd like to buy Briar Farm and imprison me there for life, along with the dust and ashes of my ancestor's long-lost brother--but I shouldn't like it! No, child!--not even you, attractive as you are, could turn me into a Farmer Jocelyn!" He tried to take her in his arms, but she drew herself back from him. "You speak truly," she said, in a measured, lifeless tone--"Nothing could turn you into a Farmer Jocelyn. For he was an honest man!" He winced as though a whip had struck him, and an ugly frown darkened his features. "He would not have hurt a dog that trusted him," she went on in the same monotonous way--"He would not have betrayed a soul that loved him!" All at once the unnatural rigidity of her face broke up into piteous, terrible weeping, and she flung herself at his feet. "Amadis, Amadis!" she cried. "It is not--it cannot be you who are so cruel!--no, no!--it is some devil that speaks to me--not you, not you, my love, my heart! Oh, say it isn't true!--say it isn't true! Have mercy--mercy! I love you, I love you! You are all my life!--I cannot live without you! Amadis!" Vexed and frightened for himself at her sudden wild abandonment of grief, he stooped, and gripping her by the arm tried to draw her up from the floor. "Be quiet!" he said, roughly--"I will not have a scandal here in my studio! You'll bring my man-servant up in a moment with your stupid noise! I'm ashamed of you!--screaming and crying like a virago! If you make this row I shall go away!" "Oh, no, no, no!--do not go away!" she moaned, sobbingly--"Have some little pity! Do not leave me, Amadis! Is everything forgotten so soon? Think for a moment what you have said to me!--what you have been to me! I thought you loved me, dear!--yes, I thought you loved me!--you told me so!" And she held up her little hands to him folded as in prayer, the tears raining down her cheeks--"But if for some fault of mine you do not love me any more, kill me now--here--just where I am!--kill me, Amadis!--or tell me to go away and kill myself--I will obey you!--but don't--don't send me into the empty darkness of life again all alone! Oh, no, no! Let me die rather than that!--you would not think unkindly of me if I were dead!" He took her uplifted hands in his own--he began to be "artistically" interested,--with the same sort of interest Nero might have felt while watching the effects of some new poison on a tortured slave,--and a slight, very slight sense of regret and remorse tugged at his tough heart-strings.