The words struck Reimers like a blow. He started back and tried to disengage himself from her. But the slender fingers held his hand with a spasmodic grasp which almost hurt him. "You!" he cried. "How can that be?" Hannah had become calm. She stroked his hair tenderly. "How can that be?" she repeated. "Dearest! a woman can always find out anything she really wants to know. I wished to know this, and I know it." In bitter shame the man broke down completely. He kissed the hem of her robe, and would have turned to the door. "Forgive! forgive me!" he murmured. But the fair hands would not let him go, and close in his ear a trembling voice whispered: "Stay, my beloved! For we belong to each other. I am--what you are. We are damned together, both of us. Stay!" Reimers gazed up at her speechless, his eyes full of a terrible question. Hannah rose. All signs of weariness had fallen from her; she stood erect, a sombre dignity in the expression of her countenance. She pointed back to that part of the house formerly inhabited by her husband. "Through him," she said, in accents of denunciation, "I have been ruined. He has destroyed my life, so that I am--what I am." She looked down upon the kneeling man before her, and suddenly the wild look of hatred and unrelenting sternness died out of her face. "And now," she went on softly, "as things are, I could almost bless him for what he has done." Bitter irony invaded her tone. "Besides, he has bidden me adieu now like a man of honour. He is in Paris, and is going henceforth to devote himself entirely to art." But then again lamentations burst from her lips, and long pent-up confessions, which she poured forth with a self-accusing candour. "Listen, beloved," she said. "When he took me for his wife, a sort of dizzy enchantment overwhelmed me. We lived as in a mad whirl of intoxication. The hours that were not passed together we counted lost; and there was nothing he could have asked of me in vain. He set my foot on his neck and called me queen, goddess. And I--I gave him my beauty." She lifted her head with an imperial gesture, and a proud smile curved her lips. "I was a spendthrift," she went on. "Undraped I have danced before him; and down in the garden he had a tent erected--people never could guess the purpose of those canvas walls, but there I sat to him, naked, on his dun-coloured Irish mare, Lady Godiva. And he fell weeping on his knees and worshipped me. He longed for a thousand eyes, that he might drink in the twofold beauty--mine, and the noble animal's. He boasted that he would not repine if his eyes were stricken with blindness after having looked upon us." She paused for a moment. The eternal might of beauty illumined her brow as though with an invisible crown. Then she bowed her head, and her voice lost its resonance.