“You won’t? Have you grown utterly hard and cold and strange then to me? Have you no mercy, no pity, no compunction? Can you face me like a stock or a stone, and trample on my heart like this? Don’t you know that you gave me the right to love you--by your kisses, by the specious words that have fallen from your lips? And I believed in them! I believed that some day I should be your wife! Oh Delaval! if I have showed an undisciplined mind, a want of decorum, it is your fault. You are a man, I but a poor weak loving woman. You are the stronger, I but the weaker vessel. It is you who should have saved me from myself. It is you who should have placed a dam against the sluice-gates of a love that is going to wreck my whole life! Delaval, dearest, say, have you _never_ cared for me? Has it all been untrue, a hideous delusion, a chimera of my own brain?--a device of the Devil to lull me in a slumber of Paradise only to awake to a full sense of his tortures? Oh, if I could die! If I could die! For I have nothing to live for now--nothing! I _shall_ die; for I could not live and see another come between my Heaven and me! I could curse her!” Lord Delaval winces a little at this. Curses are hard words to come near the soft little tender girl he is going to marry, and whose words to him are as shy as the light of a star. But, just for once, he is taken rather aback. Shoals of women have loved him, and reproached him, but never like this. It is the first time he has evoked such a fierce tornado, and for a moment it staggers him. Then he becomes conscious of a feeling of thankfulness that this woman, beautiful and adoring, is not going to be his _wife_! “I can do nothing but regret!” he says gently. “My faith is pledged to your sister, and--and--forgive me if I say that I do not wish to recall it! It is kinder to you, and kinder to myself, to speak openly!” After this, nothing can be said, she feels. She rises slowly from her knees, and stands a little apart. After all, she is not bad, she is not lost to shame; and it dyes her cheek crimson, while her lids droop over the fire in her eyes, and her mouth trembles--as much perhaps with wrath as sorrow. What man can look utterly unmoved on such a spectacle as this? “I feel so much for you,” he says quite softly, “but Fate has decreed our paths to divide, and who can act against Fate? My faith, as I said, is pledged to Zai; but there is no reason that you and I, Gabrielle, should be foes. I shall always care for you, always take an interest in you, always be glad to be a _brother_ to you!” “A _brother_!” she mutters. “I am no hypocrite! I could never feel like a sister towards you, and I will not pretend it! But we’ll part in peace! Only--only--!” She flings her arms round him, and lifts up wild wet eyes, their fire and wrath all quenched in the passion that floods her whole being, “Say that you _have_ loved me, if you do not love me now!”