tured heart to reveal itself," he answered,
"as one would fain uncover an inner wound, though there be no hope of
cure. I can go the calmer to my doom for having at least given outlet
in words to the flame kindled in a moment within me. My doom! Yes, and
none so unwelcome, either, if by it I escape a lifetime of vain
longing!"

"Your talk is incomprehensible, sir. If you are serious, it must be
that your head is turned."

"My head is turned, doubtless, but by you!"

He was now assuming the low, quick, nervous utterance that is often
associated with intense repressed feeling; and his words were
accompanied by his best possible counterfeit of the burning, piercing,
distraught gaze of passion. Though he acted a part, it was not with
the cold-blooded art of a mimic who simulates by rule; it was with the
animation due to imagining himself actually swayed by the feeling he
would feign. While he _knew_ his emotion to be fictitious, he _felt_
it as if it were real, and his consequent actions were the same as if
real it were.

"I'm sure the act was not intentional with me," said Elizabeth. "I'd
best leave you, lest you grow worse." And she moved towards the door.

Peyton had rapid work of it, pushing the chair before him and hopping
after it, so as to intercept her. In the excitement of the moment, he
lost his mastery of himself.

"But you must not go! Hear me, I beg! Good God, only a half hour
left!"

"A half hour?" repeated Elizabeth, inquiringly.

"I mean," said Peyton, recovering his wits, "a half hour till the
troops may be here for me,--only a half hour until I must leave your
house forever! Do not let me be deprived of the sight of you for those
last minutes! Tis so short a time, yet 'tis all my life!"

"The man is mad, I think!" She spoke as if to herself.

"Mad!" he echoed. "Yes, some do call it a madness--the love that's
born of a glance, and lasts till death!"

"Love!" said she. "'Tis impossible you should come to love me, in so
short a time."

"'Tis born of a glance, I tell you!" he cried. "What is it, if not
love, that makes me forget my coming death, see only you, hear only
you, think of only you? Why do I not spend this time, this last hour,
in pleading for my life, in begging you to hide me and send the troops
away without me when they come? They would take your word, and you are
a woman, and women are moved by pleading. Why, then, do I not, in the
brief time I have left, beg for my life? Because