At her invitation we strolled together across the lawn to a shady spot at the river's brink, where we sat in long wicker chairs, tea being brought to us by the smart man-servant. Again and again I sought to discover some truth from her, but she was ever wary not to betray either herself or those under whose roof she was now living. As I lounged there by her, gazing upon her neat-girdled figure, so graceful and striking in every form, I could not help reflecting that, in a mind not utterly depraved and hardened by the habit of crime, conscience must awake at some time or other, and bring with it a remorse closed by despair, and despair by death. Had her conscience been awakened that afternoon? To me it seemed very much as though it had. "How strangely you talk, Eva," I said, when we had been conversing together a long time beneath the trees, and the sun was already sinking. "You seem somehow to entertain an extraordinary antipathy towards me." "Antipathy!" she echoed. "Oh, no, you are really mistaken. You ask me to love you, and I express myself unfortunately unable." "But why unable?" She sighed, but was silent. Her eyes were fixed far away down the tranquil river which ran with liquid gold in the sunset. From my lips there poured swift, eager, breathless, unconsidered words in all their unreason, all their wisdom, their nobility, their ignorance, their folly, their sublimity. Yet I meant to their very uttermost every syllable I uttered. "Tell me now," I urged. "You wish me to leave you without a single word of hope. You give me a negative reply without reason or explanation." "I have a reason," she answered in a low, mechanical tone, a voice quite unusual to her. "What is it?" "I am a stern fatalist in principle and in action," she responded. "And is it that which prevents you from reciprocating my affection?" "No," she answered, shaking her head sadly, and glancing at her rings. "I know that happiness can never more come to me. To love would only be to increase my burden of remorse." "Remorse?" I cried, in a moment recollecting all the mysterious past. "Yes," she answered in a hard tone of melancholy and despair. "A remorse that arises from the pang of a wounded conscience, the recoil of the violated feelings of my nature, a horror of the ghastly past, a torture of self-condemnation strong as my soul, deep as my guilt, fatal as my resolve, and terrible as my crime." "Your crime!" I gasped. She had at last confessed. I sat gazing at her absolutely dumbfounded. My brain seemed dead in me.