'Is the emotion with which you have inspired me likely to be mingled with jest, or with insult to you?' 'Oh, this is too much!' said Maude, interlacing her fingers, with difficulty restraining tears of anger and resentment, while, with a keen sense of future danger and his presumption, she felt as if there was something unreal and grotesque in the situation. Moreover, she was anxious to get her letter into the house postal bag ere the latter was taken away. 'I am deeply earnest, Miss Lindsay,' resumed Sharpe, still with great humility of tone and manner. 'My regard for you is no passing fancy. I learned to love you from the first moment I saw you.' 'Mr. Sharpe,' said Maude, gathering courage from desperation, 'I do not understand why you venture to talk in this style to me! Encouragement I have never given you, even by a glance.' 'Too well do I know that,' said he, affecting a mournful tone; 'but I hope to lead you to--to like me a little in return.' 'I don't dislike you,' said Maude, again seeking to temporize. 'And, if possible, to love me--as a man--one to whom you can entrust a future you cannot see--one whom you will one day call husband.' He drew nearer as his voice became lower and more earnest, and Maude recoiled hastily in growing dismay, and the words 'a future you cannot see' stung her deeply. Too well did she know that all this bold love-making was born of the humbled, fallen, and peculiar nature of her position under her ancestral rooftree, and of the ruin of her family--a ruin on which this man was rising under his sister's wing! 'I beseech you, Mr. Sharpe,' said she, 'to say no more on this subject, for more than the merest friendship there can never be between us.' 'Have you thought it over?' 'Certainly not!' His face clouded, and his usually bold, observant, and keen gray eyes became inflamed with growing anger. 'Seriously--deliberately you refuse to accord me the slightest hope?' 'Yes.' 'You think by this bearing to humiliate me as much as a proud girl can do?' 'You pain me now by speaking thus,' she responded more gently. 'And you ruin my life!' 'I think not,' said Maude, with a little curl on her lovely lip. 'And may make that ruin a subject of jest to your brother's fine friends who are coming here in a few days--a few hours, rather, now.' At this coarse remark Maude accorded him an inquiring stare. 'Oh, I know what young girls are,' he resumed in a half-savage, half-sullen manner. 'A rejection like mine is just the sort of thing they like to boast of.'