"Forgotten him!" she repeats thoughtfully. "No, not that! not that! I might as well try to forget myself. I remember every line of his face, his voice, and his ways, and every word he said almost; but if I were to see him standing close to us here, I should not feel the slightest inclination to go to him, or to call him to come to me. I feel all dead everywhere." They remain in the same attitude for several minutes, neither of them stirring nor uttering a word. Then Esther speaks, with a certain uneasy abruptness. "Well!" she says, "I am waiting!--waiting for you to call me a murderess and a bad woman, and all the other names that St. John gave me, on much less provocation. Make haste!" she says, with a nervous forced laugh; "I am in a hurry to hear that I have succeeded in getting rid of my last friend. Quick! quick!--tell me that you hate me, and have done with it!" "_Hate_ you!" he repeats, tenderly; his brave voice trembling a little in spite of himself, and the meekness of a great heroism ennobling his face. "You, poor soul! Why should I hate you because another man is better and more loveable than I, and because you have eyes to see it?" The eyes he speaks of turn upon him, wide and startled, in astonished disbelief of his great generosity. "You don't understand!" she says, quickly. "You don't take it in. I was _engaged_ to him; I was going to marry him, and all the time I never once mentioned your name to him, of my own accord; and when he asked me about you, I said you were only a common acquaintance. You _must_ hate me!" she ends, vehemently; "don't pretend that you don't!" "Hush!" he answers sorrowfully, but very gently, "that is nonsense! I don't even hate him; at least" (pausing a moment, to thrust down and trample under foot one more spasm of that intolerable burning jealousy)--"at least, I try not. It was my own fault. I knew all along that I was poor, and stupid, and awkward, that I had nothing but sheer love to give you, and I hoped against hope that that might win you at last. We all set our affections upon some one thing, I suppose," he says, with a patient, pitiful smile, "and I daresay it is all the better for us in the end that we don't often get it: but oh, love! love! you might have told me!" Then his resolution breaks a little, and, covering his face with his hands, he groans aloud, in a man's dry-eyed agony--how much awfuller to see than a woman's little tears, that flow indifferently for a dead pet dog, or a dead husband! Esther sits looking at him during several minutes, awestruck, as a child that has made a grown-up person cry; then one of those quick impulses that carry some women away seizes her. "Bob!" she says, putting her sweet mouth close to his ear, while her gentle, vibrating voice thrills down to his stricken soul, "I have been very bad to you, but I will make up for it!" "Will you?" he says, looking up with a mournful, sceptical smile; "how?"