“I must speak this once at any cost--Great God! and forgive me, I love her so,” he whispered, as he seized her listless form, so unresisting, and wildly kissed her brow, her lips, her hair, her eyelids--sealed her to him by those caresses that were prompted by love’s unreasoning fury. The whole earth revolved in one vast throb of song, and the wind, entuned, seemed to catch the music in its chase. Nothing under the sun could equal those moments with them. At first they were so happy; then there came a desire--which comes to those of deep and tender sensibilities when their felicity becomes so acute that it verges upon pain--the desire, the involuntary longing, to die--an abandon of self--a forgetting. In this moment of delirium he was the first to speak. “I have known from the first that we were meant for each other.” She did not answer; she was so thoroughly intoxicated just then, that if he should have dared to give her blows her heart would have arraigned him at its bar, with weeping paid the costs, and swore the blow was kind--she loved him so. “I say that we were meant for each other,” he repeated. “Love like ours should be the first law of the universe, after love of God.” “I am thy neighbor’s wife,” she answered, slowly. “I now admit no ties except the one that fate has made between your heart and mine.” “Think, Marrion, of what you say. Is it a sin for us to love?” He could not answer at once--all the iron in his strong nature was broken down. His emotions, so long withheld, and now uncontrolled, were more than he could bear. He looked long into her trusting countenance. He was seeking by a violent effort to master himself; but it was only by the heaving of his breast, and now and then a gasp for breath, that he betrayed the stormy struggle within. Though his nature was full of the softer sympathies he could not call them to the front--he was but man. This was the crucial test. There is in some affections so much to purify and exalt, that even an erring love, conceived without a cold design, and wrestled against with a noble spirit, leaves the heart more tolerant and tender if it leaves it in time. “It may be wrong,” he said, at length, “but this is our fate--our fate,” as if waking from some hideous dream. “We are creatures of destiny, I have fought this love but it would not die. The very loneliness of your existence appeals to me; but for that, I might have conquered.” “And your tender care and help have often reconciled me to my lot, and extinguished many bitter feelings in me.” “You trusted me, Cherokee, and I believe there is a kind of sanctity in your ignorance and trust--there is a soul about you as well as a body. Is it with that soul you have loved me?” “Yes, Marrion, I love you better than life now.”