“What do you mean?” she cried. “You speak in riddles. What is Karl to me? I have driven him out of my heart, crushed his very image in my brain. He is nothing to me.” Her excited protest aroused my resentment. “You, too, are using words which are meaningless if judged only by the common laws of entity. Yet it is not a week since you knelt here, in a passion of tears, and wrapped Karl in your innermost soul. Do not deceive yourself any longer. He is your preordained mate, and he is pining for you. Yet he is giving his life to rescue you from emotions which cause you poignant suffering. Go to him! Clasp him in your arms! You cannot, you must not, continue to resist him.” Poor girl! She looked wildly into my eyes, and then shrank away from me with a heartbreaking sob. She could not choose but believe me. In some respects, I was as thoroughly unstrung as she. I did not stop to consider whether or not I had taken the best way to win her to my point of view. Yet I endeavored most desperately, and it is somewhat to my credit, I fancy, to rescue the situation from the tornado into which it was plunged so suddenly. “Try and listen to me calmly,” I said, for Maggie was crumpled up in a low chair, and gasping, without tears, in that agonizing manner of women when misery vanquishes them. “Karl loves you, and you love him. The sovereign passion has made a battle-ground of your hearts. You are at once happy and miserable, conscious of a superhuman ecstasy, yet self-condemned to separation from the one being who is all in all to you. The tension cannot endure. For five years the voluntary screen erected by you placed him and you in a spiritual trance. It has fallen now, and forever, yielding to the rude assault of those who dare to sever the bond which unites you until death. Is it not time you flew to your lover’s embrace? Do you hold your scruples dearer than his life?” “No, no, not that,” she whispered. “None can be to Karl what I have been. But I am fearful of myself, fearful that I may destroy what I cannot create. Oh, what shall I say to make you understand that I have withheld myself from him not for my own sake but for his?” “Let me reassure you there. Though Karl has never spoken to me of his love for you, I am sure he appreciates your self-sacrifice to the uttermost degree. And I, too, vaguely yet sincerely as I conceive a life beyond the grave, have formed some idea of the burthen you have borne. You are an inseparable element of Karl’s existence. Owing to you, and through you, he developed faculties whose potency now threatens to overwhelm him. You are part of his very being, the spontaneous Eve of his earthly Paradise. Joined with you, he rises beyond the clouds of our present knowledge. Bereft of you, he sinks back to the level of every-day humanity. Do not force me to say harsh things of an obstinacy which keeps you apart.”