"I don't think he would have cared much about me, if I had let him alone," says Esther, taking a sort of gloomy pleasure in painting herself as black as possible. There is a pause--a pause, during which Brandon is fighting one of those duels in which most men have to engage at least once in their lives--the duel with a mortal agony, that says, tauntingly, "I am your master! I have conquered you!" to which one that is valiant makes answer, "You are strong, you are terrible; but you are _not_ my master. I will keep you under!" "You will go to him then, of course, instead of coming to us?" he says, presently, speaking in some one else's voice (for it certainly is not his own), and keeping his head turned away; for no one is willing to parade their death-pangs before others' eyes. She laughs derisively. "Go to him! Hardly! I should get but an indifferent welcome if I did. You know I never told him a word about you--ladylike and honourable of me, wasn't it?--but some one else did him that good office; and now, if he were to see me falling over the edge of that cliff, he would not put out a finger to save me. That is his sort of love!" She ends, bitterly, "And I think he is right." Another longer silence. Brandon is wrestling with that adversary of his, that deadly anger and pain; that riotous, tigerish jealousy, that makes us all murderers for the time, in thought at least; that mad, wild longing--madder, wilder than any love ardour, than any paroxysm of religious zeal--to have his hands, for one moment of strong ecstasy, about the throat of the rich man that has robbed him of his one ewe lamb. The sweat of that combat stands cold upon his brow, but he overcomes. After a while he speaks gently, as one would speak to a little sick child: "Were you very fond of him, Esther?" "I suppose so," she answers with reflective calmness, looking straight before her. "I must have been, or I should not have said and done the mean things I did. I should not have degraded myself into begging him to take me back again, when I might as well have begged of this rock" (thrusting her soft hand against it) "to turn to grass and flowers. He told me that he would never forgive me, either in this world or the next! I thought it very dreadful at the time, but I don't much care now whether he forgives me or not." "Have you forgotten him so completely already?" asks Bob, forgetting his own misery for the moment, in sheer blank amazement.