Page:Gissing - The Nether World, vol. III, 1889.djvu/142

132 a sacrifice, you’re strong enough to face it; yes, yes, strong enough to face more than this, my Jane is! Only fix your thoughts on the work you’re going to do. It’ll take up all your life, Jane, won’t it? You’ll have no time to give to such things as occupy other women,—no mind for them.”

His grey eyes searched her countenance with that horrible intensity of fanaticism which is so like the look of cruelty, of greed, of any passion originating in the baser self. Unlike too, of course, but it is the pitilessness common to both extremes that shows most strongly in an old, wrinkled visage. He had laid his hand upon her. Every word was a stab in the girl’s heart, and so dreadful became her torture, so intolerable the sense of being drawn by a fierce will away from all she desired, that at length a cry escaped her lips. She fell on her knees by him, and pleaded in a choking voice.

“I can’t! Grandfather, don’t ask it of me! Give it all to some one else—to some one else! I’m not strong enough to make such a sacrifice. Let me be as I was before!”

Michael’s face darkened. He drew his hand away and rose from the seat; with more than