"Ah!" she burst out passionately, "why not, indeed, while you are here?
You, sir, the tempter, you the eavesdropper, you the sunderer of loving
hearts! You, serpent, who found our home a paradise, and see it now a
hell!"

"Do you dare to accuse me thus, madam, without a shadow of evidence?"

"Dare? I dare anything, for I know all! I have watched you, sir, and I
have borne with you too long."

"Me, madam, whose only sin towards you, as you should know by now, is to
have loved you too well? Rose! Rose! have you not blighted my life for
me--broken my heart? And how have I repaid you? How but by sacrificing
myself to seek you over land and sea, that I might complete your
conversion to the bosom of that Church where a Virgin Mother stands
stretching forth soft arms to embrace her wandering daughter, and cries
to you all day long, 'Come unto me, ye that are weary and heavy laden,
and I will give you rest!' And this is my reward!"

"Depart with your Virgin Mother, sir, and tempt me no more! You have
asked me what I dare; and I dare this, upon my own ground, and in my
own garden, I, Donna Rosa de Soto, to bid you leave this place now and
forever, after having insulted me by talking of your love, and tempted
me to give up that faith which my husband promised me he would respect
and protect. Go, sir!"

The brothers listened breathless with surprise as much as with rage.
Love and conscience, and perhaps, too, the pride of her lofty alliance,
had converted the once gentle and dreamy Rose into a very Roxana; but it
was only the impulse of a moment. The words had hardly passed her lips,
when, terrified at what she had said, she burst into a fresh flood of
tears; while Eustace answered calmly:

"I go, madam: but how know you that I may not have orders, and that,
after your last strange speech, my conscience may compel me to obey
those orders, to take you with me?"

"Me? with you?"

"My heart has bled for you, madam, for many a year. It longs now that
it had bled itself to death, and never known the last worst agony of
telling you--"

And drawing close to her he whispered in her ear--what, the brothers
heard not--but her answer was a shriek which rang through the woods, and
sent the night-birds fluttering up from every bough above their heads.

"By Heaven!" said Amyas, "I can stand this no longer. Cut that devil's
throat I must--"

"She is lost if his dead body is found by her."

"We are lost if we stay here, then," sai