"No," she replied, hastily pulling herself together. "I must go now. I had no business to come here at all--it was only because it seemed the last chance of speaking to you. I have said what I came to say, and now I must go back to my sister." She looked all round the well-remembered room--at the green rep suite, and the flowery carpet, and the cedar chiffonnier, and the Cenci over the fire-place--at Paul's bookshelves and littered writing-table, and his pipes and letters on the chimney-piece, and his newspapers on the floor; and then she looked at him with eyes that _would_ cry, though she did her very best to help it. "Good-bye," she said, turning towards the door. He took her outstretched hand and held it "Good-bye--if it must be so," he said. "You are really going away by the next mail?" "Yes." "And not coming back again?" "I don't know." "Well," he said, "you are rich, and a great lady now. I can only wish with all my heart for your happiness--I cannot hope that I shall ever be privileged to contribute to it again. I am out of it now, Miss Patty." She left her right hand in his, and with the other put her handkerchief to her eyes. "Why should you be out of it?" she sobbed. "Your father is not out of it. It is you who have deserted us--we should never have deserted you." "I thought you threw me over that day on the racecourse, and I have only tried to keep my place." "But I have told you I never meant that." "Yes, thank God! Whatever happens, I shall have this day to remember--that you came to me voluntarily to tell me that you had never been unworthy of yourself. You have asked me to forgive you, but it is I that want to be forgiven--for insulting you by thinking that money and grandeur and fine clothes could change you." "They will never change me," said Patty, who had broken down altogether, and was making no secret of her tears. In fact, they were past making a secret of. She had determined to have no tender sentiment when she sought this interview, but she found herself powerless to resist the pathos of the situation. To be parting from Paul Brion--and it seemed as if it were really going to be a parting--was too heartbreaking to bear as she would have liked to bear it. "When you were poor," he said, hurried along by a very strong current of emotions of various kinds, "when you lived here on the other side of the wall--if you had come to me--if you had spoken to me, and treated me like this _then_--" She drew her hand from his grasp, and tried to collect herself. "Hush--we must not go on talking," she said, with a flurried air; "you must not keep me here now."