‘You are unjust to me,’ Sidney replied, with emotion, but not resentfully.  ’I can enter into all your sufferings.  If I speak calmly, it’s because I must, because I daren’t give way.  One of us must try and be strong, Clara, or else—­’

He turned away.

‘Let us leave this house,’ she continued, hardly noticing what he said, ’Let us live in some other place.  Never any change—­always, always the same walls to look at day and night—­it’s driving me mad!’

’Clara, we can’t move.  I daren’t spend even the little money it would cost.  Do you know what Amy has been doing?’

‘Yes; father told me.’

’How can we go to the least needless expense, when every day makes living harder for us?’

’What have we to do with them?  How can you be expected to keep a whole family?  It isn’t fair to you or to me.  You sacrifice me to them.  It’s nothing to you what I endure, so long as they are kept in comfort!’

He stepped nearer to her.

’What do you really mean by that?  Is it seriously your wish that I should tell them—­your father and your sisters and our brother—­ to leave the house and support themselves as best they can?  Pray, what would become of them?  Kept in comfort, are they?  How much comfort does your poor father enjoy?  Do you wish me to tell him to go out into the street, as I can help him no more?’

She moaned and made a wild gesture.

’You know all this to be impossible; you don’t wish it; you couldn’t bear it.  Then why will you drive me almost to despair by complaining so of what can’t be helped?  Surely you foresaw it all.  You knew that I was only a working man.  It isn’t as if there had been any hope of my making a larger income, and you were disappointed.’

‘Does it make it easier to bear because there is no hope of relief?’ she cried,

‘For me, yes.  If there were hope, I might fret under the misery.’

’Oh, I had hope once!  It might have been so different with me.  The thought burns and burns and burns, till I am frantic.  You don’t help me to bear it.  You leave me alone when I most need help.  How can you know what it means to me to look back and think of what might have been?  You say to yourself I am selfish, that I ought to be thankful some. one took pity on me, poor, wretched creature that I am.  It would have been kinder never to have come near me.  I should have killed myself long ago, and there an end.  You thought it was a great thing to take me, when you might have had a wife who would—­’

’Clara!  Clara!  When you speak like that, I could almost believe you are really mad.  For Heaven’s sake, think what you are saying!  Suppose I were to reproach you with having consented to marry me?  I would rather die than let such a word pass my lips—­but suppose you heard me speaking to you like this?’

She drew a deep sigh, and let her hands fall.  Sidney continued in quite another voice: