He saw the eyes of the desperately wily young woman slink sideways.  Dr. Middleton was pacing at ever shorter lengths closer by the door.

“You hate me?” Willoughby sunk his voice.

“If it should turn to hate!” she murmured.

“Hatred of your husband?”

“I could not promise,” she murmured, more softly in her wiliness.

“Hatred?” he cried aloud, and Dr. Middleton stopped in his walk and flung up his head:  “Hatred of your husband? of the man you have vowed to love and honour?  Oh, no!  Once mine, it is not to be feared.  I trust to my knowledge of your nature; I trust in your blood, I trust in your education.  Had I nothing else to inspire confidence, I could trust in your eyes.  And, Clara, take the confession:  I would rather be hated than lose you.  For if I lose you, you are in another world, out of this one holding me in its death-like cold; but if you hate me we are together, we are still together.  Any alliance, any, in preference to separation!”

Clara listened with critical ear.  His language and tone were new; and comprehending that they were in part addressed to her father, whose phrase:  “A breach of faith”:  he had so cunningly used, disdain of the actor prompted the extreme blunder of her saying—­frigidly though she said it: 

“You have not talked to me in this way before.”

“Finally,” remarked her father, summing up the situation to settle it from that little speech, “he talks to you in this way now; and you are under my injunction to stretch your hand out to him for a symbol of union, or to state your objection to that course.  He, by your admission, is at the terminus, and there, failing the why not, must you join him.”

Her head whirled.  She had been severely flagellated and weakened previous to Willoughby’s entrance.  Language to express her peculiar repulsion eluded her.  She formed the words, and perceived that they would not stand to bear a breath from her father.  She perceived too that Willoughby was as ready with his agony of supplication as she with hers.  If she had tears for a resource, he had gestures quite as eloquent; and a cry of her loathing of the union would fetch a countervailing torrent of the man’s love.—­What could she say? he is an Egoist?  The epithet has no meaning in such a scene.  Invent! shrieked the hundred-voiced instinct of dislike within her, and alone with her father, alone with Willoughby, she could have invented some equivalent, to do her heart justice for the injury it sustained in her being unable to name the true and immense objection:  but the pair in presence paralyzed her.  She dramatized them each springing forward by turns, with crushing rejoinders.  The activity of her mind revelled in giving them a tongue, but would not do it for herself.  Then ensued the inevitable consequence of an incapacity to speak at the heart’s urgent dictate:  heart and mind became divided.  One throbbed hotly,