"I see. You would have taken pity on my loneliness--with that strange idea of being grateful for past kindnesses of a trivial description, you would have sacrificed your happiness in an attempt to attain mine. Mattie, it would have been a terrible failure." "No." "I say a terrible failure, which would have embittered both lives in lieu of promoting the happiness of either. I should have discovered the motives which had placed you at my side, and felt too keenly the encumbrance that I was upon you." "I think not!--I am sure not!" She was anxious to defend herself, to hold her best in his estimation yet, but she feared the betrayal of her secret. She could have told him how, for a few fleeting days, she had pictured her greatest happiness to be ever near him, striving to brighten every thought, and vary the monotony of every hour--sustaining, comforting, and worshipping. She could have told him of the affection of a whole life that had been spent in thinking of him, praying for him; but she held her peace, and let him think that she had never loved him. In the end, she saw that it was best to turn him from his purpose. "I would have married you, Sidney, in affliction--out of gratitude, if you choose to word it so, but a gratitude that _you_ would have never known from love," she ventured to say; "but now, when the new life, to which you will shortly turn your steps, is far removed from mine, when you require no help from me, and when there are others, fairer, better, and so much more worthy of you, I cannot hold you to a promise of which you must repent." "Why?" The position by some means had become suddenly reversed. It was she who had to speak of his pity and gratitude for her. "Because you would discover that I was not fit to be your wife, that you had not sought me out of love, but out of kindness towards me for my services. You had pledged your word in one estate, and you would keep it in another, like an honest man valuing a promise he had made, and resolving to go through with it to the end, at whatever cost to his own better chances. Therefore, Sidney, you must understand that I cannot be your wife for pity's sake--that the man who is to become my husband, must love me with all his heart, and soul, and strength, or he may go his way for me!" "I said that my romance had died out long ago. That I was too old, and had experienced too much sorrow to talk like a lover in a novel." "It seems to me--I do not know, Sid--that true love must belong partly to romance. It is too pure--too full of fancies, if you will--to mingle readily with business life; it is too deep down in the heart to rise to an every-day surface--it is full of sacrifice as well as love. All this, my idea, not yours, Sidney--I who would at least be romantic in that fashion, and would care for no one but a romantic lover." "You have altered, Mattie--you are talking like a school-girl now. If that be another reason for refusing me, it is unworthy of you."