can you have laid your plans to talk in this way to such a woman as I am?'
'I have laid no plans,' said Frank, now getting his hand to himself. 'At any rate, you wrong me there, Miss Dunstable.'
'I like you so well—nay, love you, if a woman may talk of love in the way of friendship—that if money, money alone would make you happy, you should have it heaped on you. If you want it, Mr. Gresham, you shall have it.'
'I have never thought of your money,' said Frank, surlily.
'But it grieves me,' continued she, 'it does grieve me, to think that you, you, you—so young, so gay, so bright—that you should have looked for it in this way. From others I have taken it just as the wind that whistles;' and now two big slow tears escaped from her eyes, and would have rolled down her rosy cheeks, were it not that she brushed them off with the back of her hand.
'You have utterly mistaken me, Miss Dunstable,' said Frank.
'If I have, I will humbly beg your pardon,' said she. 'But—but—but—'
'You have; indeed you have.'
'How can I have mistaken you? Were you not about to say that you loved me; to talk absolute nonsense; to make me an offer? If you were not, if I have mistaken you indeed, I will beg your pardon.'
Frank had nothing further to say in his own defence. He had not wanted Miss Dunstable's money—that was true; but he could not deny that he had been about to talk that absolute nonsense of which she spoke with so much scorn.
'You would almost make me think that there are none honest in this fashionable world of yours. I well know why Lady de Courcy has had me here: how could I help knowing it? She has been so foolish in her plans that ten times a day she has told her own secret. But I have said to myself twenty times, that if she were crafty, you were honest.'
'And am I dishonest?'
'I have laughed in my sleeve to see how she played her game, and to hear others around playing theirs; all of them thinking that they could get the money of the poor fool who had come at their beck and call; but I was able to laugh at them as long as I thought that I had one true friend to laugh with me. But one cannot laugh with all the world against one.'
'I am not against you, Miss Dunstable.'
'Sell yourself for money! why, if I were a man I would not sell one jot of liberty for mountains of gold. What! tie myself in the heyday of my youth to a person I could never love, for
