"No, I will not keep you--I will not take advantage of you now," he replied, "though I am horribly tempted. But if it had been as it used to be--if we were both poor alike, as we were then--if you were Patty King instead of Miss Yelverton--I would not let you out of this room without telling me something more. Oh, why did you come at all?" he burst out, in a sudden rage of passion, quivering all over as he looked at her with the desire to seize her and kiss her and satisfy his starving heart. "You have been hard to me always--from first to last--but this is the very cruellest thing you have ever done. To come here and drive me wild like this, and then go and leave me us if I were Mrs. M'Intyre or the landlord you were paying off next door. I wonder what you think I am made of? I have stood everything--I have stood all your snubs, and slights, and hard usage of me--I have been humble and patient as I never was to anybody who treated me so in my life before--but that doesn't mean that I am made of wood or stone. There are limits to one's powers of endurance, and though I have borne so much, I _can't_ bear _this_. I tell you fairly it is trying me too far." He stood at the table fluttering his papers with a hand as unsteady as that of a drunkard, and glaring at her, not straight into her eyes--which, indeed, were cast abjectly on the floor--but all over her pretty, forlorn figure, shrinking and cowering before him. "You are kind enough to everybody else," he went on; "you might at least show some common humanity to me. I am not a coxcomb, I hope, but I know you can't have helped knowing what I have felt for you--no woman can help knowing when a man cares for her, though he never says a word about it. A dog who loves you will get some consideration for it, but you are having no consideration for me. I hope I am not rude--I'm afraid I am forgetting my manners, Miss Patty--but a man can't think of manners when he is driven out of his senses. Forgive me, I am speaking to you too roughly. It was kind of you to come and tell me what you have told me--I am not ungrateful for that--but it was a cruel kindness. Why didn't you send me a note--a little, cold, formal note? or why did you not send Mrs. Yelverton to explain things? That would have done just as well. You have paid me a great honour, I know; but I can't look at it like that. After all, I was making up my mind to lose you, and I think I could have borne it, and got on somehow, and got something out of life in spite of it. But now how can I bear it?--how can I bear it _now?_"