om pride has ever been the topmost quality,
have never expressed sorrow to any one for anything. Thus, I might urge
that my present abjectness must be intolerably painful to me, and should
incline you to forgive. But such an argument were specious merely.
I will be quite frank with you. I will confess to you that, in this
humbling of myself before you, I take a pleasure as passionate as it is
strange. A confusion of feelings? Yet you, with a woman's instinct, will
have already caught the clue to it. It needs no mirror to assure me
that the clue is here for you, in my eyes. It needs no dictionary of
quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul. And I
know that from two open windows my soul has been leaning and signalling
to you, in a code far more definitive and swifter than words of mine,
that I love you."

Zuleika, listening to him, had grown gradually paler and paler. She had
raised her hands and cowered as though he were about to strike her. And
then, as he pronounced the last three words, she had clasped her hands
to her face and with a wild sob darted away from him. She was leaning
now against the window, her head bowed and her shoulders quivering.

The Duke came softly behind her. "Why should you cry? Why should you
turn away from me? Did I frighten you with the suddenness of my words? I
am not versed in the tricks of wooing. I should have been more patient.
But I love you so much that I could hardly have waited. A secret hope
that you loved me too emboldened me, compelled me. You DO love me. I
know it. And, knowing it, I do but ask you to give yourself to me, to
be my wife. Why should you cry? Why should you shrink from me? Dear,
if there were anything... any secret... if you had ever loved and been
deceived, do you think I should honour you the less deeply, should not
cherish you the more tenderly? Enough for me, that you are mine. Do you
think I should ever reproach you for anything that may have--"

Zuleika turned on him. "How dare you?" she gasped. "How dare you speak
to me like that?"

The Duke reeled back. Horror had come into his eyes. "You do not love
me!" he cried.

"LOVE you?" she retorted. "YOU?"

"You no longer love me. Why? Why?"

"What do you mean?"

"You loved me. Don't trifle with me. You came to me loving me with all
your heart."

"How do you know?"

"Look in the glass." She went at his bidding. He followed her. "You
see them?" he said, after a long pause. Zuleik