"Hear me," he says, passionately: "if I am worsted in this fight—and I see no ray of hope anywhere—I am a ruined man. I shall then have literally only five hundred a year that I can call my own. No home; no title. And such an income as that, to people bred as you and I have been, means simply penury. All must be at an end between us, Dorothy. We must try to forget that we have ever been more than ordinary friends."
This tirade has hardly the effect upon Dorothy that might be desired. She still stands firm, utterly unshaken by the storm that has just swept over her (frail child though she is), and, except for a slight touch of indignation that is fast growing within her eyes, appears unmoved.
"You may try just as hard as ever you like," she says, with dignity: "I sha'n't!"
"So you think now; but by and by you will find the pressure too great, and you will go with the tide. If I were to work for years and years, I could scarcely at the end achieve a position fit to offer you. And I am thirty-two, remember,—not a boy beginning life, with all the world and time before him,—and you are only twenty. By what right should I sacrifice your youth, your prospects? Some other man, some one more fortunate, may perhaps——"
Here he breaks down ignominiously, considering the amount of sternness he had summoned to his aid when commencing, and, walking to the mantelpiece, lays his arm on it, and his head upon his arms.
"You insult me," says Dorothy, growing even whiter than she was before, "when you speak to me of—of——"
Then she, too, breaks down, and, going to him, deliberately lifts one of his arms and lays it round her neck; after which she places both hers gently round his, and so, having comfortably arranged herself, proceeds to indulge in a hearty burst of tears. This is, without exception, the very wisest course she could have taken, as it frightens the life out of Nicholas, and brings him to a more proper frame of mind in no time.
"Oh, Dorothy, don't do that! Don't, my dearest, my pet!" he entreats. "I won't say another word, not one, if you will only stop."
"You have said too much already, and there sha'n't be an end of it, as you declared just now," protests Doatie, vehemently, who declines to be comforted just yet, and is perhaps finding some sorrowful enjoyment in the situation. "I'll take very good care there sha'n't! And I won't let you give me up. I don't care how poor you are. And I must say I think it is very rude and heartless of you, Nicholas, to want to hand me over to 'some other man,' as if I was a book or a parcel! 'Some other man,' indeed!" winds up Miss Darling, with a final sob and a heavy increase of righteous wrath.
"But what is to be done?" asks Nicholas, distractedly, though inexpressibly cheered by these professions of loyalty and devotion. "Your people won't hear of it."