“Hear me out, dear Marcel! for indeed I mean to reassure you! Listen, then! Since you love me so well that you would even marry me—ugh!—rather than lose me, hear me promise, Marcel, that you shall never lose me. I will never, never, never leave you to marry any one at all! I will stay with you and be your own faithful, affectionate, devoted niece, loving you as if I were your daughter—loving and serving you as my dear uncle, and even as if you were my own father! Now, Marcel, I promise to do this on the word of a de la Vera, whose very name is Truth! if only you would give up this mad and sacrilegious idea of me, which, of course, I know you will readily do.” “And is this your plan for ‘harmonizing our lives’ and making me happy?” he groaned, with such a look of anguish that Gloria could not endure it. With a low cry of pain she averted her face. “But, child, I will not torture you, as I see I am doing now. Time and patience—time and patience work wonders. I must wait and hope—wait and hope,” he breathed, with the reiteration of misery. She arose and stood behind him, and with her hand on the back of his chair, murmured: “Marcel, I am not angry, but I am very, very unhappy. I must go now and stay by myself a little while.” “Go, then, Gloria! Go!” he moaned, without turning to look at her. Gloria fled to her own room; but even there the agonized face she had left behind followed her, haunted her, and tormented her. Then she dressed herself in her seal jacket and hat and went out, and walked up and down under the cold starlight of the Christmas night until she was so weary that she could walk no longer. Finally she returned to the house and retired to bed without again seeing her guardian. The terrible mental trials of the days and weeks that followed, surpass all powers of description. The deep, devoted, constant love of Marcel de Crespigney for the beautiful child he called his ward, had been fanned by opposition and fear of disappointment into an intense and insane passion. He lost all patience, all self-control; he could no longer refrain from pleading with her or caressing her, even when he saw that his words and actions inflicted tortures unendurable upon the gentle and sensitive soul. And Gloria, she suffered with a subtle anguish, difficult to analyze, impossible to describe. As his niece and child, she loved and pitied her uncle, with all her young, compassionate heart, even as she had loved and pitied him from her earliest infancy up to present girlhood. But with her Christian faith and training she believed his suit to her to be most sinful and sacrilegious, and she shrank from it in horror and loathing unspeakable and indescribable. Yet, whenever she betrayed these emotions of fear and abhorrence, the look of utter misery they would call up on his face would cause a momentary revulsion of feeling in her, melting her heart to tenderness and sympathy. He would be quick to see this change and gather hope from it.