She turns her face slowly round towards him—a face paled by her late agonies, thinned by long fastings, and by thousands of great tears. "Because," she replies, "I have one friend in the world now; and when I have answered you, I shall have none!"
"What do you mean?"
"If I were to come to you, I should come as your supposed future wife, shouldn't I? Well, I should be an impostor."
A great sickening fear whitens his brown face, but he contains himself, and speaks quietly: "Do you think I meant to bargain with you? Do you think I meant to make a profit for myself out of your troubles? What have I ever done to make you think me so mean?" he asks, reproachfully.
She draws a heavy sighing breath. "Why am I beating about the bush?" she says, chiding herself; "it must out, sooner or later! Oh, Bob! Bob! if I had it in me to be sorry about anything, I should be sorry about this!"
"About what?" he asks, cruelly excited. "Look this way, Esther. Is it—is it what I have been afraid of all along?"
Her head sinks in shamed dejection on her breast. "Yes, it is," she answers, faintly.
There will be a great storm at sea to-night; the gulls are circling about, calling wildly to one another—here, twenty miles inland.
"Who is it?" asks Bob, in a husky whisper, presently.
She sighs again, profoundly. "Do you remember," she says, "before I went to the Gerards'—how many hundred years ago was that?—your saying one day that you wished they had not got a son, and my laughing at you about it? Well! you were right!—it is he!"