But when Neil took her hands in his, and removing from them the sock and darning-needle, said to her, "Bessie, I did not mean to tell you, at least not yet, but I cannot keep it any longer. I love you and want you for my wife," she looked up an instant, and then her eyes fell before the passionate face, and she cried: "Oh, Neil! You are not in earnest! You do not mean what you say. You cannot want me. I am so very poor. I must take care of my father, and then--there is--there is--oh, Neil, I am sorry if it is wrong to say it--there is my mother!"
She put the whole hard facts before him at once, her poverty, her father, for whom she must always care, and her mother, the greatest obstacle of all.
"I know all that. Don't you suppose I thought it out before I spoke?" Neil said, drawing her closer to him as he continued: "I am going to tell you the whole truth about myself, and show you my very worst. I am a great, lazy, selfish fellow, and have never in my life done any one any good. I have lived for myself and my pleasure alone. I am not one quarter as good as Grey Jerrold, or even Jack Trevellian."
At the mention of Grey, Bessie gave a little start, for a thought of him seemed to cast a shadow over the sky, which for a moment had been very bright, if Neil really and truly loved her. But the shadow passed as Neil went on, rapidly: "I never had any home training; that is, never met any opposition to my wishes. Everything bent to me until I came to believe myself supreme; but, Bessie, I know that there is in me the material for a man, something like Grey Jerrold. I speak of him because he represents to me the noblest man I ever knew, and I always feel my inferiority when I am with him, and show at my worst by contrast. You know what I mean. You felt his power when he was here; the tone of his voice; the way he put things; the indescribable something which makes him so popular everywhere, I don't know what it is. I would give the world if I possessed it. I have watched him many a time at Eton and at Oxford and elsewhere, when he was surrounded by a lot of London swells, young lords and sons of earls, who would cut me dead, but who took to the American at once and made him more than their equal. Once I asked him how he did it and if it were not an awful bore always to consider others before himself. I shall never forget the expression of his face as he hesitated a moment and seemed to be looking far off at something in the past. Then he said: 'Sometimes it is hard; but long ago, when I was a boy, I made a vow to live for others rather than myself, to try to make somebody happy every day with a kind word or act or look, and only think, if I live to a good old age, how many people's lives will have been a little sunnier because of me. Suppose I commenced this plan at fourteen and that I live to be seventy, which is not very old, it will make over twenty thousand, and that surely ought to atone for a great deal--don't you think so?--and in a way my life is a kind of atonement.' That is what he said, or the substance of it, and I have often thought of it and wondered what he meant by an atonement."