She gave a bitter sigh, and touched her forehead with trembling fingers. “If words could prove it, I had been convinced but now, for they are well devised, and they have music, too; but such a music, my lord, as would drown the truth in the soul of a woman. Your words allure, but you have learned the art of words. You yourself--oh, my lord, you who have tasted all the pleasures of this world, could you then have the heart to steal from one who has so little that little which gives her happiness?” “You know not what can make you happy--I can teach you that. By God’s Son! but you have wit and intellect and are a match for a prince, not for a cast-off Camisard. I shall ere long be lord-lieutenant of these isles--of England and Ireland. Come to my nest. We will fly far! Ah, your eye brightens, your heart leaps to mine--I feel it now, I--” “Oh, have done, have done,” she passionately broke in. “I would rather die, be torn upon the rack, burned at the stake, than put my hand in yours. And you do not wish it--you speak but to destroy, not to cherish. While you speak to me I see all those”--she made a gesture as though to put something from her--“all those to whom you have spoken as you have done to me. I hear the myriad falsehoods you have told--one whelming confusion. I feel the blindness which has crept upon them--those poor women--as you have sown the air with the dust of the passion which you call love. Oh, you never knew what love meant, my lord. I doubt if when you lay in your mother’s arms you turned to her with love. You never did one kindly act for love; no generous thought was ever born in you by love. Sir, I know it as though it were written in a book: your life has been one long calculation--your sympathy or kindness a calculated thing. Good-nature, emotion you may have had, but never the divine thing by which the world is saved. Were there but one little place where that Eden flower might bloom within your heart, you could not seek to ruin that love which lives in mine and fills it, conquering all the lesser part of me. I never knew of how much love I was capable until I heard you speak to-day. Out of your life’s experience, out of all that you have learned of women, good and evil, you--for a selfish, miserable purpose--would put the gyves upon my wrists, make me a pawn in your dark game--a pawn which you would lose without a thought as the game went on.