She dared not think what might come next.
"Is it nothing to you to know that you are more to me than any thing else ?" demanded he, and his tone was becoming husky and unsteady.

The passion that had been smouldering within him so long, unsuspected in its intensity even by himself, was now beginning to be-stir itself, and shoot forth jets of flame.

"Why have you let yourself be with me--why have you made yourself necessary to me--if I was nothing to you ?" Sophie, in the extreme depths of her degradation and abasement, became all at once quiet and composed.

She lifted her face, pale, and smitten with suffering, from her hands, and, folding them in her lap, looked at Bressant calmly, because she understood herself at last, and felt that the time for hiding her head in shame had gone by.
"You have _not_ been nothing to me," said she, "though I didn't know it before, or, rather, I _would_ not.

I had an idea that I was leading you up to higher things, as an angel might, and all the time I was making use of God's truth and recommendation, as it were, to gratify and shield my own selfishness and--" here her voice sank, and her lips quivered, and grew dry, but she waited, and struggled, and finally went on--"and immodesty.