He was shaken from head to foot with the struggle her words excited. With her arms clinging thus around him, in a moment he would yield--and there was a voice within which whispered hoarsely that to yield would be to tempt a fearful fate. What might he not be led to do next? What impossible sacrifice of self-respect might not become inevitable? He had no jot of faith in his own power to make a future. Imagine this woman some day cooling in her love, and speaking with her pale face unutterable things. She would have a right to reproach him, and a reproach divined would drive him to frenzy. She was weak--he would not shape that into words, but the knowledge was in his heart. After all the features of her life that she had revealed to him, how could he dare the step she tempted him to? His love for her was so sincere that to place her in a position which might touch him with shame on her behalf was in thought a horror. Of whom would she borrow a large sum of money on her bare word? That, to begin with, was impossible; think what it would cost her. Before, all was different. Her income and his put together did not in truth seem to him sad poverty; for her love’s sake she would have contented herself. But the new responsibilities--and then this latest revelation---- Not in linked thoughts, but in swiftly successive flashes of feeling, did these things pass through his mind. He suffered terribly in the moments while the struggle lasted. But at length he found that--he knew not how--he had put away her clinging arms. “Isabel, we cannot do that.” The words seemed to come unbidden; he heard them as if another spoke. “I love you too well, my own soul! I feel you must not think of that.” She hung her head, passion-worn, and he heard her ask: “Do you love me?” He knelt at her feet and pressed her joined hands against his heart. “Do I love you? Do you know what it has cost me to refuse to take your life and make it part of mine?” “You do seem to love me, Bernard.” She stroked the hair upon his forehead, and put it back with soft woman’s touch. Her voice was low and caressing; moisture made her eyes large. “You will not fail me? You will still love me, till I can make myself free?” “And you?” “Do I speak and act as if my love were a thing that will easily pass?” “That is well and wisely spoken,” he returned, smiling up at her. “That is better in my eyes than if you had vowed to love me for ever. We cannot vow love; we can only say that we love with all the strength of our being, and silently feel that it is not a thing of brief life. I shall never ask you to promise to love me, only to say that you do.” “But that is almost as if you feared.” “For you, or for myself?” “You have no fear that your love for me will fail? Dear, I am not the wife you should have sought.” “You are the wife I was fated to seek; that is enough. You are throned above all women when my soul worships.”