“I have told my mother all, Miss St. Just.  And she has said ’Go; it is your only hope.’  She has other sons to comfort her.  Let us say no more of it.  Had I thought that you would have disapproved of it, I would never have mentioned the thing.”

“Disapprove of—­your going to die?  You shall not!  And for me, too:  for I guess all—­all is my fault!”

“All is mine,” said he quietly:  “who was fool enough to fancy that I could forget you—­conquer my love for;” and at these words his whole voice and manner changed in an instant into wildest passion.  “I must speak—­now and never more—­I love you still, fool that I am!  Would God I had never seen you!  No, not that.  Thank God for that to the last:  but would God I had died of that cholera! that I had never come here, conceited fool that I was, fancying that it was possible, after having once—­No!  Let me go, go anywhere, where I may burden you no more with my absurd dreams!—­You, who have had the same thing said to you, and in finer words, a hundred times, by men who would not deign to speak to me!” and covering his face in his hands, he strode on, as if to escape.

“I never had the same thing said to me!”

“Never?  How often have fine gentlemen, noblemen, sworn that they were dying for you?”

“They never have said to me what you have done.”

“No—­I am clumsy, I suppose—­”

“Mr. Headley, indeed you are unjust to yourself—­unjust to me!”

“I—­to you?  Never!  I know you better than you know yourself—­see in you what no one else sees.  Oh, what fools they are who say that love is blind!  Blind?  He sees souls in God’s own light; not as they have become:  but as they ought to become—­can become—­are already in the sight of Him who made them!”

“And what might I become?” asked she, half-frightened by the new earnestness of his utterance.

“How can I tell!  Something infinitely too high for me, at least, who even now am not worthy to kiss the dust off your feet.”

“Oh, do not speak so:  little do you know—!  No, Mr. Headley, it is you who are too good for me; too noble, single-eyed, self-sacrificing, to endure my vanity and meanness for a day.”

“Madam, do not speak thus!  Give me no word which my folly can distort into a ray of hope, unless you wish to drive me mad.  No! it is impossible; and, were it possible, what but ruin to my soul?  I should live for you, and not for my work.  I should become a schemer, ambitious, intriguing, in the vain hope of proving myself to the world worthy of you.  No; let it be.  ‘Let the dead bury their dead, and follow thou me.’”

She made no answer—­what answer was there to make?  And he strode on by her side in silence for full ten minutes.  At last she was forced to speak.

“Mr. Headley, recollect that this conversation has gone too far for us to avoid coming to some definite understanding—­”

“Then it shall, Miss St. Just.  Then it shall, once and for all:  formally and deliberately, it shall end now.  Suppose,—­I only say suppose,—­that I could, without failing in my own honour, my duty to my calling, make myself such a name among good men that, poor parson though I be, your family need be ashamed of nothing about me, save my poverty?  Tell me, now and for ever, could it be possible—­”