r sight, but in my own I was your
equal. You only saw a man to whom your gracious alms and your gentle
charity were to be given, as a queen may stoop in mercy to a beggar; but
I saw one who had the light of my old days in her smile, the sweetness
of my old joys in her eyes, the memories of my old world in her every
grace and gesture. You forget! I was nothing to you; but you were so
much to me. I loved you the first moment that your voice fell on my ear.
It is madness! Oh, yes! I should have said so, too, in those old years.
A madness I would have sworn never to feel. But I have lived a hard life
since then, and no men ever love like those who suffer. Now you know
all; know the worst that tempts me. No famine, no humiliation, no
obloquy, no loss I have known, ever drove me so cruelly to buy back my
happiness with the price of dishonor as the one desire--to stand in my
rightful place before men, and be free to strive with you for what they
have not won!"

As she heard, all the warmth, all the life, faded out of her face; it
grew as white as his own, and her lips parted slightly, as though to
draw her breath was oppressive. The wild words overwhelmed her with
their surprise not less than they shocked her with their despair.
An intense truth vibrated through them, a truth that pierced her and
reached her heart, as no other such supplication ever had done. She
had no love for him yet, or she thought not; she was very proud, and
resisted such passions; but in that moment the thought swept by her that
such love might be possible. It was the nearest submission to it she
had ever given. She heard him in unbroken silence; she kept silence
long after he had spoken. So far as her courage and her dignity could be
touched with it, she felt something akin to terror at the magnitude of
the choice left to her.

"You give me great pain, great surprise," she murmured. "All I can trust
is that your love is of such sudden birth that it will die as rapidly--"

He interrupted her.

"You mean that, under no circumstances--not even were I to possess
my inheritance--could you give me any hope that I might wake your
tenderness?"

She looked at him full in the eyes with the old, fearless, haughty
instinct of refusal to all such entreaty, which had made her so
indifferent--and many said so pitiless--to all. At his gaze, however her
own changed and softened, grew shadowed, and then wandered from him.

"I do not say that. I cannot tell----"