"Love!" she repeats, dreamily--"love! love!" saying over and over again the familiar, common word, until by very dint of frequent repetition it grows unfamiliar, odd, void of meaning. "I have used up all I ever had of that: perhaps I never had much, but I think you the very best man that ever lived. Is not that enough to go upon?" He shakes his head with a slight smile. "Worse and worse! that would be a difficult character to live up to. No!" he says, looking at her, with the nobility of an utter self-abnegation in his sorrowful blue eyes. "I will _never_ marry you, Essie! never!--I swear it! If you were to go down on your knees to me, I would not: I should deserve that God should strike me dead if I could be guilty of such unmanly selfishness!" "You refuse me then?" she says, with a sigh of half-unconscious relief. "Was ever such a thing heard of? And I have not even the satisfaction of being able to be angry with you." "I refuse you!" he answers, steadily, taking her two little hands in his. "But--look at me, dear, and believe me--as I said to you before, so I say now, I shall love you to-day, and to-morrow, and always!" The two young people sit silent; each looking down, as it were with inner eyes, on the wreck of their own destiny--wrecked already! though their ships have so lately left the port. The vapours still curl about the dun hills: the clouds stoop low, as if to mingle with their sister mists. With many a sigh, and with many a shiver, the trees shower down the ruddy rain of their leaves; earth is stripping her fair body for the winter sleep. Then Brandon speaks: "Promise me one thing, Essie!" "_Anything_ almost." "That this--this--_talk_ we have had shall make no difference as to your coming to us!" "What!" she cries, suddenly springing to her feet, tears of remorse and mortification rushing to her eyes. "After having done you the worst injury a woman can do a man, am I to be indebted to you for daily bread--for food, and clothes, and firing? How much lower do you wish me to fall? Have you _no_ pity on me?" "You are misstating the case," he says, quietly, his downcast eyes fixed on a little fern that, with his stick, he is up-digging from its strait home between two neighbour rocks: "you will be indebted to _me_ for nothing; I shall not even be there; I shall have gone back to Bermuda." "Gone!" she repeats, blankly. "Are _you_ going too? Is everybody going away from me? And do you think," she continues, passionately, "that it will be easier for me to lie under such an obligation to your mother and sisters than to you? Is not it always harder to say 'Thank you!' to a woman than to a man? And would not I immeasurably rather sell matches, or hot potatoes at the street-corners, than do either?"