"Afraid of me!" he says, reproachfully. "By your own showing, then, you could not have loved me perfectly, for 'perfect love casteth out fear,' If you are afraid of me, it is indeed time for us to part."
"I see you are bent on misconstruing every word I say," she says, hopelessly, and yet with a little petulant movement of shoulder and head, "and so I'll hold my tongue."
He looks at her, not relentingly, but with infinite sadness. "I almost wish that Constance had left me in my Fool's Paradise!" he says.
"Constance!" exclaims Esther, quickly. "Was it she that told you?"
"It was," he answers, quietly: "she heard it this morning; she was annoyed with me for not going to the ball, and chose this ingenious and, I must say, complete mode of revenge."
"What had I done to her?" says Essie, bringing her two hands together sharply, and looking upwards to Heaven's great black, blue floor above her,
"Thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
"What had I done to her," she says, in a sort of wonder, "that she should do me such a mischief?"
Looking at her as she stands with upturned eyes, like some sweet prayerful saint or penitent Magdalen, drawn by a cunning hand that has been resolved three centuries back into elemental dust—dust that has stopped a bunghole perhaps, like Alexander's—Gerard's resolution breaks a little; not his resolution of parting from her—that remains firm as ever—but his power of so parting with nonchalant coldness. "Child!" he cries, a little roughly, and yet with a half-groan, placing a hand heavily on each of her shoulders—"Child! why are you so pretty? If it was your nature to be deceitful and underhand, why could not you be ugly too? Your beauty is the one thing about you that I believe in, and it drives me distracted!"
"And yet," she answers, with a melancholy smile, "you told me just now, very calmly, to go back to—to him: you seemed to contemplate with great equanimity the prospect of seeing me and my distracting beauty" (with a bitter emphasis) "in another man's possession."