"I have come to bid you all good-by," he answers, in a low, quick voice, with his eyes bent on the ground; "you know"--raising them, and beginning to laugh hoarsely--"if--if--things had gone right--you would have been my nearest relation by now." I shudder. "Yes," say I, "I know." "I am going away," he goes on, raising his voice to a louder tone of reckless unrest, "_where?_--God knows!--_I_ do not, and do not care either!--going away for good!--I am going to let the abbey." "To _let_ it!" "You are _glad_!" he cries in a tone of passionate and sombre resentment, while his great eyes, lifted, flash a miserable resentment into mine; "I _knew_ you would be! I have not given you much pleasure very often, have I?"--(still with that same harsh mirth).--"Well, it is something to have done it _once_!" I clasp my down-hanging hands loosely together. I lift my eyes to the low, dark sky. "_Am_ I glad?" I say, hazily. "I do not know!--I do not think I am!--I do not think I care one way or another!" "Nancy!" he says, presently, in a tone no longer of counterfeit mirth, but of deep and serious earnestness, "I do not know why I told you just now that I had come to bid them all good-by--it was not true--you know it was not. What are they to me, or I to them, now? I came--" "For what did you come, then?" cry I, interrupting him, pantingly, while my eyes, wide and aghast, grow to his face. What is it that he is going to say? He--from whose clasp Barbara's dead hand was freed! "Do not look at me like that!" he cries, wildly, putting up his hands before his eyes. "It reminds me--great God! it reminds me--" He breaks off; then goes on a little more calmly: "You need not be afraid! Brute and blackguard as I am, I am not quite brute and blackguard enough for _that_!--that would be past _even_ me! I have come to ask you once again to forgive me for that--that old offense" (with a shamed red flush on the pallor of his cheeks); "I asked you once before, you may remember, and you answered"--(recalling my words with a resentful accuracy)--"that you _'would not, and, by God's help, you never would'_!" "Did I?" say I, with that same hazy feeling. Those old emotions seem grown so distant and dim. "I dare say!--I did not recollect!" "And so I have come to ask you once again," he goes on, with a heavy emphasis--"it will do me no great harm if you say 'No' again!--it will do me small good if you say 'Yes.' And yet, before I go away _forever_--yes"--(with a bitter smile)--"cheer up!--_forever!_--I must have one more try!" I am silent. "You may as well forgive me!" he says, taking my cold and passive hand, and speaking with an intense though composed mournfulness. "After all, I have not done you much harm, have I?--that is no credit to me, I know. I would have done, if I could, but I could not! You may as well forgive me, may not you? God forgives!--at least"--(with a sigh of heavy and apathetic despair)--"so they say!--would _you_ be less clement than He?"