"Enough, then; you know your own feelings, or ought to. Since Rube is the one dearest to you, marry him!" He turned again upon his heel. Obeying an impulse she could not resist, Mell once more detained him. It is hard to die, everybody says; but to die yourself must be easier than to give up the one you love. "Jerome, wait a moment! Come back! Jerome, you do not realize what a dishonorable thing this is you are persuading me to do?" "Don't I?" he laughed wildly. "God Almighty! Mellville, what do you take me for? Wouldn't I have been here a week ago, two weeks ago, but for the battle I have had to fight with my own scruples--but for the war I have had to wage with my own soul? I have said to myself, again and again, 'I will not do this thing though I die!' But when I started out upon this journey, it had come to this: 'I must do this thing or else--die!'" Shaken as a storm-rifted tree bending in the blast, she was not yet uprooted. "It is hard, hard," she murmured, wringing her hands in nervous constraint; "but time, you know, Jerome, time softens everything." "It does!" he said, harshly--"even the memory of a crime!" "What do you mean by that?" exclaimed Mell, every word of his filling her with indefinable fears. "I mean what I say. Once out of the way, you and Rube, the two beings most dear to me on earth, could be happy together; you have told me so. Then, how selfish in me--" "Oh, Jerome, you would not! Surely you would not do such a thing!" "I do not say that I would, nor that I would not. A desperate man is not to be depended on either by himself or others. I only know that in this fearful upheaval of all my life's aims and ends, any fate seems easier than living. But Mellville--" his tones were now quiet, but they were firm; his lips were set in angles of immovable resolve; his brow bent and dark with the shadows of unlifting determination. It would be difficult to imagine a more striking figure than Jerome in the role of a man who had made up his mind-- "But Mellville, this struggle must end. It must end _now_, or it will put an end to us. I did not come here to-night to submit to the humiliation of begging a woman to marry me against her will. I came to rescue a being in distress from the painful consequences of her own rash act. Now, then, you love me, or you do not? You will marry me, or you will not? Which is it? Answer! In five minutes I leave this house, with or without you!" He dropped upon his knees at her feet; he snatched her to his breast. Reason was gone, his soul all aflame: