The sudden kindness—­the warm, high-minded, fearless sympathy which met me on such mercifully equal terms, which appealed with such delicate and generous abruptness straight to my heart, my honour, and my courage, overcame me in an instant.  I tried to look at her when she took my hand, but my eves were dim.  I tried to thank her, but my voice failed me.

“Listen to me,” she said, considerately avoiding all notice of my loss of self-control.  “Listen to me, and let us get it over at once.  It is a real true relief to me that I am not obliged, in what I have now to say, to enter into the question—­the hard and cruel question as I think it—­of social inequalities.  Circumstances which will try you to the quick, spare me the ungracious necessity of paining a man who has lived in friendly intimacy under the same roof with myself by any humiliating reference to matters of rank and station.  You must leave Limmeridge House, Mr. Hartright, before more harm is done.  It is my duty to say that to you; and it would be equally my duty to say it, under precisely the same serious necessity, if you were the representative of the oldest and wealthiest family in England.  You must leave us, not because you are a teacher of drawing——­”

She waited a moment, turned her face full on me, and reaching across the table, laid her hand firmly on my arm.

“Not because you are a teacher of drawing,” she repeated, “but because Laura Fairlie is engaged to be married.”

The last word went like a bullet to my heart.  My arm lost all sensation of the hand that grasped it.  I never moved and never spoke.  The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at our feet came as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead leaves too, whirled away by the wind like the rest.  Hopes!  Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally far from me.  Would other men have remembered that in my place?  Not if they had loved her as I did.

The pang passed, and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it remained.  I felt Miss Halcombe’s hand again, tightening its hold on my arm—­I raised my head and looked at her.  Her large black eyes were rooted on me, watching the white change on my face, which I felt, and which she saw.

“Crush it!” she said.  “Here, where you first saw her, crush it!  Don’t shrink under it like a woman.  Tear it out; trample it under foot like a man!”

The suppressed vehemence with which she spoke, the strength which her will—­concentrated in the look she fixed on me, and in the hold on my arm that she had not yet relinquished—­communicated to mine, steadied me.  We both waited for a minute in silence.  At the end of that time I had justified her generous faith in my manhood—­I had, outwardly at least, recovered my self-control.

“Are you yourself again?”

“Enough myself, Miss Halcombe, to ask your pardon and hers.  Enough myself to be guided by your advice, and to prove my gratitude in that way, if I can prove it in no other.”