"Me!" said Deleah. The shock of the surprise made her for a moment breathless. She sat and gazed at him with wide eyes for what seemed an age, saying nothing; and he also, for the moment incapable of further speech, gazed back. At last "Bessie?" Deleah got out. "You mean Bessie?" "Why should I mean Bessie? _Bessie!_" he said, and flung the thought of her from him with scorn. "Why should I mean Bessie? I mean you--you--you!" he said, and endured her silence with eyes that clung desperately to her face. "When I leave here, to go into that fine house--with the carriage and--conservatories--will you come too?" "Oh, no!" Deleah said, whispering, with drooping head. Then they sat opposite each other on table and dresser and were silent, while the blood sang loudly in Deleah's ears, and beat with such cruel throbbing in the man's temples that he did not know how to endure the agony, and thought that his head must burst. When Deleah at last lifted her eyes and looked at him the change in his face frightened her, his breath came hard and noisily as if he had been running. Was it possible he could feel like that--this quiet, inoffensive, uninteresting, middle-aged boarder, who had never appeared to feel anything particularly before? About her? "I am so sorry," she said in genuine distress, horribly grieved at and ashamed of her part in his pain. "I thought it was Bessie." "You have refused me? You mean it--absolutely? There is no hope for me?" Deleah shivered. It was the regulation phrase used by the rejected lover in the novel of the day. It had thrilled Deleah a hundred times as she had read it. There was nothing stilted or theatrical in the words as Charles Gibbon said them, but they brought home to her the unwelcome fact that he was in deadly earnest, that he loved her, and she was dealing him a cruel blow. She felt miserable, humiliated, ashamed. It was preposterous, out of all proportion, that he should have had to ask such a question, in such a tone, of little Deleah Day. "I am so very sorry, Mr. Gibbon," she said again, and he heard in a silence that made her heart ache. "Shall you go away?" she asked him presently. In books the lover being rejected removed himself for a time in order to recover from the blow. She was relieved to find in the boarder's case this was not considered necessary. "Why should I go away?" he asked. "It will be better to go on just the same," she advised eagerly. "Bessie need never know." "Bessie!" he said again contemptuously; he loosed his grip of the dresser, and swung round, standing with his back to her, that she might not see his face. "You've crushed every hope I had; you've--broken me; and you talk to me of Bessie. What, in the name of heaven or hell, do you suppose I care for _Bessie_; or whether she knows or not?"