"Perhaps some day you will feel what I am feeling now."

"Perhaps" (doubtfully).

"And you will find then that it is no laughing matter."

"Perhaps" (still more doubtfully).

The clamour of a fresh cohort of plates shaking noisily upon a tray warns Brandon that his time is short.

"Esther!" with a sort of despair in his voice, clashing the ridiculous with the pathetic—they are always twin sisters—"I could live upon such a little hope."

"What would you have me say?" she cries, standing with fluttering colour, tapping feet, and irritated eyes. "I have told you the plain truth, and it does not please you; must I dress up some pretty falsehood, and tell you that I fell in love with you at first sight, or that after all I find that you are the only man in the world that can make me really happy?"

"Say nothing of the kind!" he answers, wincing under her irony. "I have not much to recommend me, we all know that, and I start with the disadvantage of your thinking me rather a bore than otherwise; but other men have overcome even greater obstacles; why should not I? Give me at least a trial!"

She is silent.

"Say that you will try to like me; there need be no untruth in that."

"But if I fail!" says Esther, wavering—partly in sheer weariness of the contest, partly in womanly pity for sufferings which owe their rise to the excess of her own charms.

"If you fail you will not have to tell me so; I shall find it out for myself, and—and I shall bear it, I suppose." He ends with a heavy sigh at that too probable possibility.

"And you will console yourself by telling all your friends what a flirt I am, and how ill I treated you." Apparently he does not think this suggestion worthy of refutation; at least he does not refute it. "Or, if you don't, your mother will."

"Not she" (indignantly).

"Or, if she does not, your sisters will."

"Not they" (less indignantly).

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