evening to explain it. I hope you will not judge of me by my hesitating manner when I speak to you. You see me at my greatest disadvantage. It is most unfortunate for me that I wish you to see me at my best, and that I know you see me at my worst.”
She moved slowly on when he paused, and he moved slowly on beside her.
“It seems egotistical to begin by saying so much about myself,” he resumed, “but whatever I say to you seems, even in my own ears, below what I want to say, and different from what I want to say. I can’t help it. So it is. You are the ruin of me.”
She started at the passionate sound of the last words, and at the passionate action of his hands, with which they were accompanied.
“Yes! you are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me. I have no resources in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of myself when you are near me or in my thoughts. And you are always in my thoughts now. I have never been quit of you since I first saw you. Oh, that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!”
A touch of pity for him mingled with her dislike of him, and she said: “ Mr. Headstone, I am grieved to have done you any harm, but I have never meant it.”
“There!” he cried, despairingly. “Now, I seem to have reproached you, instead of revealing to you the state of my own mind! Bear with me. I am always wrong when you are in question. It is my doom.”
Struggling with himself, and by times looking up at the deserted windows of the houses as if there could be anything written in their grimy panes that would help him, he paced the whole pavement at her side, before he spoke again.