"You would contract no new ones," he rejoins, earnestly; "on the contrary. Essie, you told me just now that you would be very glad to be able to make up to me for any pain you may have made me suffer: _now_ is your time!--_now_ is your opportunity!" "How?" she sobs, lifting up her head, and speaking with a slow, plaintive intonation. "You will be at the other side of the world, thousands of miles away! How will it affect _you?_" "I _shall_ be at the other side of the world," he answers, steadily; "better that I should be so! better so! But do you think that my being so far away will make it pleasanter for me to think of the one creature I love above all others on the face of the earth, starving, or worse than starving, at home?" "Worse than starving!" she repeats, opening her great, wide eyes in astonishment. "What _can_ be worse than starving? Oh! I see what you mean" (a light breaking in upon her, and the colour flushing faintly into her face). "You think I should go to the bad--do something disgraceful, if I had nobody to look after me: I am sorry you have such a bad opinion of me, but I don't wonder at it," she ends, with resigned depression. "I have no bad opinion of you!" he answers, eagerly; "but I know the end that women, originally as pure and good as you, have come to before now. I know how hard it is for a beautiful poor girl to live _honestly_ in this world, how frightfully easy to live _dis_honestly!" "Well!" she says, recklessly; "and if I did live dishonestly, what matter? Whom have I got to be ashamed of? Whom have I got to disgrace?" Brandon looks inexpressibly shocked. "Hush!" he says, putting his hand before her mouth; "you don't know what you are saying! For Heaven's sake, talk in that strain to no one but me! Any one that knew you less well than I do might misunderstand you." She looks up at him, half-frightened. "One does say dreadful things without intending it," she says, apologetically; "but I only meant to express, as forcibly as possible, how little consequence it was what happened to me." "For God's sake, word it differently then!" he says, almost sternly; "or, better still, don't say it or think it at all! It is morbid, and it is not true. If it is of no consequence to any one else what becomes of you, it is of intense, unspeakable consequence to me: how many times must I tell you that before you mean to believe it?" "To _you!_ in _Bermuda?_" she says, with a little doubting sigh. "Yes, to _me_, in _Bermuda_," he answers, firmly. "Perhaps you think that it was only because I looked upon you as my own, my _property_, that I took so great an interest in you: it was not as _mine_, it was as _yourself_, that I cared about you. You are _yourself_ still, though you are not nor ever will be mine." Then, like Guinevere's, "his voice brake suddenly."