ight came fitfully across ear and sense, as he answered
me:

"Yours and my honor's. What then?"

"This," I answered, stooping, sweeping the loose hair from that broad,
sad forehead, and pressing my lips upon it. "This: accept the gift or
reject it. As your heart is mine, so mine is yours--for ever and ever."

A momentary silence as I raised myself, trembling, and stood aside; and
the water rushed, and the storm-birds on untiring wing beat the sky and
croaked of the gale.

Then he drew me to him, folded me to his breast without speaking, and
gave me a long, tender, yearning kiss, with unspeakable love, little
passion in it, fit seal of a love that was deeper and sadder than it was
triumphant.

"Let me have a few moments of this," said he, "just a few moments, May.
Let me believe that I may hold you to your noble, pitying words. Then I
shall be my own master again."

Ignoring this hint, I laid my hands upon his arm, and eying him
steadily, went on:

"But understand, the man I love must not be my servant. If you want to
keep me you must be the master; I brook no feeble curb; no weak hand can
hold me. You must rule, or I shall rebel; you must show the way, for I
don't know it. I don't know whether you understand what you have
undertaken."

"My dear, you are excited. Your generosity carries you away, and your
divine, womanly pity and kindness. You speak without thinking. You will
repent to-morrow."

"That is not kind nor worthy of you," said I. "I have thought about it
for sixteen months, and the end of my thought has always been the same:
I love Eugen Courvoisier, and if he had loved me I should have been a
happy woman, and if--though I thought it too good to be true, you
know--if he ever should tell me so, nothing in this world shall make me
spoil our two lives by cowardice; I will hold to him against the whole
world."

"It is impossible, May," he said, quietly, after a pause. "I wish you
had never seen me."

"It is only impossible if you make it so."

"My sin found me out even here, in this quiet place, where I knew no
one. It will find me out again. You--if ever you were married to
me--would be pointed out as the wife of a man who had disgraced his
honor in the blackest, foulest way. I must and will live it out alone."

"You shall not live it out alone," I said.

The idea that I could not stand by him--the fact that he was not
prosperous, not stainless before the world--that mine would be no
ordinary