Then they sat opposite each other on table and dresser and were silent,
while the blood sang loudly in Deleah's ears, and beat with such cruel
throbbing in the man's temples that he did not know how to endure the
agony, and thought that his head must burst.
When Deleah at last lifted her eyes and looked at him the change in his
face frightened her, his breath came hard and noisily as if he had been
running. Was it possible he could feel like that--this quiet, inoffensive,
uninteresting, middle-aged boarder, who had never appeared to feel
anything particularly before? About her?
"I am so sorry," she said in genuine distress, horribly grieved at and
ashamed of her part in his pain. "I thought it was Bessie."
"You have refused me? You mean it--absolutely? There is no hope for me?"
Deleah shivered. It was the regulation phrase used by the rejected lover
in the novel of the day. It had thrilled Deleah a hundred times as she had
read it. There was nothing stilted or theatrical in the words as Charles
Gibbon said them, but they brought home to her the unwelcome fact that he
was in deadly earnest, that he loved her, and she was dealing him a cruel
blow. She felt miserable, humiliated, ashamed.
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