has
been one long calculation--your sympathy or kindness a calculated thing.
Good-nature, emotion you may have had, but never the divine thing by
which the world is saved. Were there but one little place where that
Eden flower might bloom within your heart, you could not seek to ruin
that love which lives in mine and fills it, conquering all the lesser
part of me. I never knew of how much love I was capable until I heard
you speak today. Out of your life's experience, out of all that you
have learned of women good and evil, you--for a selfish, miserable
purpose--would put the gyves upon my wrists, make me a pawn in your dark
game; a pawn which you would lose without a thought as the game went on.

"If you must fight, my lord, if you must ruin Monsieur de la Foret and
a poor Huguenot girl, do it by greater means than this. You have power,
you say. Use it then; destroy us, if you will. Send us to the Medici:
bring us to the block, murder us--that were no new thing to Lord
Leicester. But do not stoop to treachery and falsehood to thrust us
down. Oh, you have made me see the depths of shame to-day! But yet,"
her voice suddenly changed, a note of plaintive force filled it--"I have
learned much this hour--more than I ever knew. Perhaps it is that we
come to knowledge only through fire and tears." She smiled sadly. "I
suppose that sometime some day, this page of life would have scorched my
sight. Oh, my lord, what was there in me that you dared speak so to
me? Was there naught to have stayed your tongue and stemmed the tide in
which you would engulf me?" He had listened as in a dream at first. She
had read him as he might read himself, had revealed him with the certain
truth, as none other had done in all his days. He was silent for a long
moment, then raised his hand in protest.

"You have a strange idea of what makes offence and shame. I offered
you marriage," he said complacently. "And when I come to think upon it,
after all that you have said, fair Huguenot, I see no cause for railing.
You call me this and that; to you I am a liar, a rogue, a cut-throat,
what you will; and yet, and yet, I will have my way--I will have my way
in the end."

"You offered me marriage--and meant it not. Do I not know? Did you rely
so little on your compelling powers, my lord, that you must needs resort
to that bait? Do you think that you will have your way to-morrow if you
have failed to-day?"

With a quick change of tone and a cold, scornf