‘But you have,’ she said.  ’You make me very unhappy.  You condemn me.  I see you do.  And if I have done wrong it had been all because—­Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’

‘But who says you have done wrong?’

’You won’t call me Bella because you say the little birds will hear it.  If I don’t care for the little birds, why should you?’

There is no question more difficult than this for a gentleman to answer.  Circumstances do not often admit of its being asked by a lady with that courageous simplicity which had come upon Miss French in this moment of her agonising struggle; but nevertheless it is one which, in a more complicated form, is often put, and to which some reply, more or less complicated, is expected.  ’If I, a woman, can dare, for your sake, to encounter the public tongue, will you, a man, be afraid?’ The true answer, if it could be given, would probably be this; ’I am afraid, though a man, because I have much to lose and little to get.  You are not afraid, though a woman, because you have much to get and little to lose.’  But such an answer would be uncivil, and is not often given.  Therefore men shuffle and lie, and tell themselves that in love—­love here being taken to mean all antenuptial contests between man and woman—­ everything is fair.  Mr Gibson had the above answer in his mind, though he did not frame it into words.  He was neither sufficiently brave nor sufficiently cruel to speak to her in such language.  There was nothing for him, therefore, but that he must shuffle and lie.

‘I only meant,’ said he, ’that I would not for worlds do anything to make you uneasy.’

She did not see how she could again revert to the subject of her own Christian name.  She had made her little tender, loving request, and it had been refused.  Of course she knew that it had been refused as a matter of caution.  She was not angry with him because of his caution, as she had expected him to be cautious.  The barriers over which she had to climb were no more than she had expected to find in her way, but they were so very high and so very difficult!  Of course she was aware that he would escape if he could.  She was not angry with him on that account.  Anger could not have helped her.  Indeed, she did not price herself highly enough to make her feel that she would be justified in being angry.  It was natural enough that he shouldn’t want her.  She knew herself to be a poor, thin, vapid, tawdry creature, with nothing to recommend her to any man except a sort of second-rate, provincial-town fashion which, infatuated as she was, she attributed in a great degree to the thing she carried on her head.  She knew nothing.  She could do nothing.  She possessed nothing.  She was not angry with him because he so evidently wished to avoid her.  But she thought that if she could only be successful she would be good and loving and obedient and that it was fair for her at any rate to try.  Each created animal must live and get