"I? Your money? God in heaven! what can you think me?"
She grew white to the lips, all the impetuous, radiant tumult of her innocent rapture frozen into terror.
"I have done nothing wrong," she murmured with a piteous wistfulness and wonder—"nothing wrong, indeed; there is no shame in it. Will you not take it—for their sake?"
He turned on her with severity almost savage:
"It is impossible! Good God! Was I not low enough already? How dared you think a thing so vile of me? Have I ever asked pity of any living soul?"
His voice was choked in his throat; he was wounded to the heart.
He had no thought that he was cruel; he had no intent to terrify or hurt her; but the sting of this last and lowest humiliation was so horrible to all the pride of his manhood, and so bitterly reminded him of his own abject poverty; and with all this there was an emotion in him that he had difficulty to control—being touched by her ignorance and by her gift as few things in his life had ever touched him.
She stood before him trembling, wondering, sorely afraid; all the light had died out of her face; she was very pale, and her eyes dilated strangely.
For some moments there was silence between them.
"You will not take it?" she said at last, in a hushed, fearful voice, like that of one who speaks in the sight of some dead thing which makes all quiet around it.