ltering utterance; and "Shall you mourn me?" he
asked her.

But she would have no ellipses. "What are you going to do?" she
whispered.

"Do you not know?"

"Tell me."

"Once and for all: you cannot love me?"

Slowly she shook her head. The black pearl and the pink, quivering, gave
stress to her ultimatum. But the violet of her eyes was all but hidden
by the dilation of her pupils.

"Then," whispered the Duke, "when I shall have died, deeming life a vain
thing without you, will the gods give you tears for me? Miss Dobson,
will your soul awaken? When I shall have sunk for ever beneath these
waters whose supposed purpose here this afternoon is but that they be
ploughed by the blades of these young oarsmen, will there be struck from
that flint, your heart, some late and momentary spark of pity for me?"

"Why of course, of COURSE!" babbled Zuleika, with clasped hands and
dazzling eyes. "But," she curbed herself, "it is--it would--oh, you
mustn't THINK of it! I couldn't allow it! I--I should never forgive
myself!"

"In fact, you would mourn me always?"

"Why yes!.. Y-es-always." What else could she say? But would his answer
be that he dared not condemn her to lifelong torment?

"Then," his answer was, "my joy in dying for you is made perfect."

Her muscles relaxed. Her breath escaped between her teeth. "You are
utterly resolved?" she asked. "Are you?"

"Utterly."

"Nothing I might say could change your purpose?"

"Nothing."

"No entreaty, howsoever piteous, could move you?"

"None."

Forthwith she urged, entreated, cajoled, commanded, with infinite
prettiness of ingenuity and of eloquence. Never was such a cascade of
dissuasion as hers. She only didn't say she could love him. She never
hinted that. Indeed, throughout her pleading rang this recurrent motif:
that he must live to take to himself as mate some good, serious, clever
woman who would be a not unworthy mother of his children.

She laid stress on his youth, his great position, his brilliant
attainments, the much he had already achieved, the splendid
possibilities of his future. Though of course she spoke in undertones,
not to be overheard by the throng on the barge, it was almost as though
his health were being floridly proposed at some public banquet--say,
at a Tenants' Dinner. Insomuch that, when she ceased, the Duke half
expected Jellings, his steward, to bob up uttering, with lifted hands, a
stentorian "For-or," and all the company to take