‘What!’ said Wentworth, springing once more to his feet. He but dimly, vaguely understood what she meant, yet felt for a moment as if he had fallen into an ambush, as if he had been trapped into a den of thieves. He thought he saw a man’s head appearing at the door, and heard whisperings and footsteps on the stairs. This it was that produced the momentary fury of his cry; but then he regained control of himself, and looking round saw no one but the dying girl on the bed and an elderly woman standing in front of him, looking at him with deprecating yet earnest eyes. ‘It’s a great deal,’ said the woman, ‘and yet it’s nothing. It’s what will never harm you one way or another, what nobody will know, nor be able to cast in your teeth--that won’t cost you anything (except, maybe, a bit of a fee), and yet it’s everything to her. It would make all the difference between going out of this world honest and creditable and going in her shame, which it was you that brought her to it.’ ‘That’s a lie!’ said Oliver. Was it to be supposed he could think of civility at such a moment? A desperate tremor seized hold upon him. He got up and turned, half blinded with horror and excitement, towards the door. ‘I came here,’ he said, ‘because--because--’ Ah! because--why? What could he say? He had meant to be kind--to make up to her somehow, he could not tell how, for the fact that he was happy and she dying. He stood arrested with those words upon his lips, which he could not say, half turned from her, facing the door, as if he would have broken away. And then there came a low, despairing cry from the bed--the cry as of a lost creature. ‘Oh, Oliver, Oliver! you loved me once. Oh, don’t go and leave me! You loved me, and I loved you.’ He would have cried out that it was false, but the breathless voice, broken by panting that sounded like the last struggle, the voice of the woman who was dying, while he was full of life and force, silenced him in spite of himself. The mother had flown to her to raise her head, to give her something from a glass on the table, and he, too, turned again, awe-stricken, thinking the last moment had come. ‘And you can stand and see her like this,’ said the woman by the bedside, in a low tone. ‘You that are well and strong and have the world before you; and let her go out of it at five-and-twenty, a girl as you made an idol of once, a girl as you have helped to bring to this, and won’t lift a finger to satisfy her before she dies, to give her what she wants, and what will make her happy for the last hour--before she dies!’