“You must not mind what I say,” she whispers, after a moment, in a low, hoarse voice; “it’s only my own folly--only I cannot help--oh! _how_ can I _help_ loving you? Listen to me!” she goes on, pouring out her words in an eager, impetuous torrent. “I shall never see you again, you say--shall never speak to you! I will tell you all the truth then, and after that we shall part, and you will forget my madness, and I--never mind what I shall do--anyway, I shall not blame you; it isn’t your fault that you are _yourself_! and that I could not help loving you. You have been the one man in all the world to me. Ah! you can’t imagine how I have worshipped you, how you have seemed to me as the light of Heaven, as a being of another world who had deigned to speak, to look, to smile on me. It was idolatry I felt when I first looked on your face, the germ of a love that was to wreck my whole life. It has been my one ambition that you should do justice to the attraction I possess; you have been my religion, my conscience; and all I have wanted was to prove to you that I was capable of winning men’s hearts, though yours might be denied me. I have gloried in my beauty because I believed it had won you; I thanked God only yesterday on my knees that my life was crowned with your love! But it’s all over now! I have hung on every word you have spoken, I have clung to every kindly look, believing, hoping, praying that at last--at last!--no one could come between us two!” She drops his hand, and, springing up, stands opposite him, speaking fast and almost incoherently now. “It has come to this now--_now_, that you have decided to part--that I, who thought myself strong and brave, cry out in my weakness to you, tearing open the wound that you may see me writhe under it. You may scorn me, despise me, hate me if you will! I have been wicked, treacherous, unscrupulous, but if you had loved me and stayed with me I should have become a better woman. You have wrecked my whole life, but through it all, through everything, through heartlessness, caprice, falsity, dishonour, and even insult, I have loved you--loved you as no woman will ever love you in this world! I have given you my life, my soul, everything! Don’t you know me _now_, Delaval?” Dazed, almost stunned, he stares at her aghast, while his face grows ashy white, even to his lips, from which no word issues, only--only, as he gazes, in his mind dawns a misty memory, a doubt, _a repulsion_. “Is there so little of love’s instinct in your heart that a paltry mask of pink and white, a little Golden Wash, has hidden from you that I am----?” “_Gabrielle!_” He almost shouts in a voice that has a sharp ring of pain and horror in it, and he shrinks back from her, while the warmth and tenderness his face had worn fade right away, and in their place comes a cold, hard, pitiless, passionless look that stings her to the very core.