‘Mary!’ He paused, choked back some passionate emotion, and looked at her. There rushed over his mind, as by an inspiration, the conviction that what he had said, what he had proposed to do, was a mean, tyrannical way of making others suffer for his own private grudge. Mary’s mind was to be kept on the rack as to ways and means; Edmund’s comforts were to be stinted, or stopped, because he, Myles, hated Sebastian Mallory, and, knowing his sister would obey him, despotically said, ‘You will take no help from him.’ Certainly, to know that Mary and Edmund were subsisting upon Mr. Mallory’s bounty, while he was idle, would be anguish almost as keen as to sit down and subsist upon that bounty himself; but anguish, it seemed, prevailed a good deal in the world. It had to be borne by some people--what right had he to shift his portion upon the shoulders of a loving woman and a cripple boy? He cried shame upon himself. His cheek flushed, and he hesitated no longer. He had begun to speak passionately; he finished calmly. ‘I had not thought of that. You are right, Molly. You’d better do so. It will be bad for me to bear’ (how bad, his pale face and drawn lips foretold), ‘but it’s best so. This is a great trouble that has come upon us, and we must be as great as we can to meet it, I suppose. I shall look out and see if I can find anything to do--perhaps away from here. I’m sure it’s the best thing I could do. It’s a great mistake my being here at all.’ This speech, with the misery and bitterness underlying its acquiescence in her wish, seemed to freeze Mary’s heart within her. She could not understand it, yet it seemed to forebode evil and misery and woe to her. She looked at Myles, in whose whole attitude was something alien and strange. For a moment a fearful weight and foreboding oppressed her; then, breaking suddenly loose from it, she ran up to him with a cry of love, flung her arms around his neck, and kissed him eagerly. ‘Eh, Myles, hush, hush! Thou munnot talk like that. I’d clem sooner nor take a penny from any one thou didn’t like. It were only that I were quite disheartened, like, wi’ wondering what I were to do in these hard times, now yon lad is so poorly. But for thee to go away and leave us--the best brother’--a hug--‘ay, the vary best, ever a lass had--my certy, don’t say nowt about it again.’ She was half laughing, half crying. As for Myles, the clasp of her warm arms about his neck seemed to unstiffen it; the pressure of her face upon his breast appeared to loosen a load of pent-up feeling. He put his arm round her waist, and kissed her soft brown hair again and again, and once more the feeling rushed over him that this was true hearty love, and that he was a fool to distress himself for that other love, which would never be his.