"Say what, madam?"
"How I can take--take leave of you," she murmured, turning away her head.
"Take leave of me?" he cried. "Take leave of me?"
"Yes, oh, yes! Believe me, Mr. Hawkesworth," Sophia continued, beginning to stammer in her confusion, "I am not ungrateful for your attentions, I am not, indeed, ungrateful, but we--we must part."
"Never!" he cried, rising and looking down at her. "Never! It is not your heart that speaks now, or it speaks but a lesson it has learned."
Sophia was silent.
"It is your friends who would part us," he continued, with stern and bitter emphasis. "It is your cold-blooded, politic brother-in-law; it is your proud sister----"
"Stay, sir," Sophia said unsteadily. "She is my sister."
"She is; but she would part us!" he retorted. "Do you think that I do not understand that? Do you think that I do not know why, too? They see in me only a poor gentleman. I cannot go to them, and tell them what I have told you! I cannot," he continued, with a gesture that in the daylight might have seemed a little theatrical, but in the dusk of the alley and to a girl's romantic perceptions commended itself gallantly enough, "put my life in their hands as I have put it in yours! I cannot tell them that the day will come when Plomer Hawkesworth will stand on the steps of a throne and enjoy all that a king's gratitude can confer. When he who now runs daily, nightly, hourly the risk of Layer's fate, whose head may any morning rot on Temple Bar and his limbs on York Gates----"
Sophia interrupted him; she could bear no more. "Oh, no, no!" she cried, shuddering and covering her eyes. "God forbid! God forbid, sir! Rather----"