Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/181

Rh round to get between her and the French window, by which she apparently had a view of leaving the room. "That's because I've wanted to bribe you. Bribery is almost always vulgar."

"Yes, you should do better. Merci! There's a cab; some of them have come for me. I must go," Miriam added, listening for a sound that reached her from the road.

Sherringham listened too, making out no cab. "Believe me, it isn't wise to turn your back on such an affection as mine and on such a confidence," he went on, speaking almost in a warning tone (there was a touch of superior sternness in it, as of a rebuke for real folly, but it was meant to be tender), and stopping her within a few feet of the window. "Such things are the most precious that life has to give us," he added, all but didactically.

Miriam had listened again for a moment; then she appeared to give up the idea of the cab. The reader need hardly be told, at this stage of her youthful history, that the right way for her lover to soothe her was not to represent himself as acting for her highest good. "I like your calling it confidence," she presently said; and the deep note of the few words had something of the distant mutter of thunder.

"What is it, then, when I offer you everything I am, everything I have, everything I shall achieve?"

She seemed to measure him for a moment, as if she were thinking whether she should try to pass him. But she remained where she was and she returned: "I'm sorry for you, yes, but I'm also rather ashamed of you."

"Ashamed of me?"