For a moment Tom looked altogether confounded. Then he tried to recover himself, and said crossly, "Well, and if it was, where's the harm? Can't a man be civil to a pretty girl without being called over the coals in this way?" Elizabeth made no answer, at least not immediately. At last she said, in a very gentle, subdued voice, "Tom, are you fond of Esther? You would not kiss her if you were not fond of her. Do you like her as--as you used to like me?" And she looked right up into his eyes. Hers had no reproach in them, only a piteous entreaty, the last clinging to a hope which she knew to be false. "Like Esther? Of course I do? She's a nice sort of girl, and we're very good friends." "Tom, a man can't be 'friends,' in that sort of way, with a pretty girl of eighteen, when he is going to be married to somebody else. At least, in my mind, he ought not." Tom laughed in a confused manner. "I say, you're jealous, and you'd better get over it." Was she jealous? was it all fancy, folly? Did Tom stand there, true as steel, without a feeling in his heart that she did not share, without a hope in which she was not united, holding her, and preferring her, with that individuality and unity of love which true love ever gives and exacts, as it has a right to exact? Not that poor Elizabeth reasoned in this way, but she felt the thing by instinct without reasoning. "Tom," she said, "tell me outright, just as if I was somebody else, and had never belonged to you at all, do you love Esther Martin." Truthful people enforce truth. Tom might be fickle, but he was not deceitful; he could not look into Elizabeth's eyes and tell her a deliberate lie; somehow he dared not. "Well, then--since you will have it out of me--I think I do." So Elizabeth's "ship went down." It might have been a very frail vessel, that nobody in their right senses would have trusted any treasure with, still she did; and it was all she had, and it went down to the bottom like a stone. It is astonishing how soon the sea closes over this sort of wreck; and how quietly people take--when they must take, and there is no more disbelieving it--the truth which they would have given their lives to prove was an impossible lie. For some minutes Tom stood facing the fire, and Elizabeth sat on her chair opposite without speaking. Then she took off her brooch, the only love-token he had given her, and put it into his hand. "What's this for?" asked he, suddenly. "You know. You'd better give it to Esther. It's Esther, not me, you must marry now." And the thought of Esther, giddy, flirting, useless Esther, as Tom's wife, was almost more than she could bear. The sting of it put even into her crushed humility a certain honest self-assertion. "I'm not going to blame you, Tom; but I think I'm as good as she. I'm not pretty, I know, nor lively, nor young, at least I'm old for my age; but I was worth something. You should not have served me so."