“Shall I tell you what you would have done had we married?” at length she said. “Day by day you would have relapsed farther and farther into your slough. And I? You see what I am--that I am not yet grown old, and that I shall never cease to _live_. But you would have taken to waiting for Christmas, and then for Shrovetide, and to attending evening parties, and to dancing, and to thinking of nothing at all. You would have retired to rest each night with a sigh of thankfulness that the day had passed so quickly; and each morning you would have awakened with a prayer that to-day might be exactly as yesterday. _That_ would have been our future. Is it not so? Meanwhile I should have been fading away. Do you _really_ think that in such a life you would have been happy?” He tried to rise and leave the room, but his feet refused their office. He tried to say something, but his throat seemed dry, and no sound would come. All he could do was to stretch out his hand. “Forgive me!” he murmured. She too tried to speak, but could not. She too tried to extend her hand, but it fell back. Finally, her face contracted painfully, and, sinking forward upon his shoulder, she burst into a storm of sobbing. It was as though all her weapons had slipped from her grasp, and once more she was just a woman--a woman defenceless in her fight with sorrow. “Good-bye, good-bye!” she said amid her spasms of weeping. He sat listening painfully to her sobs, but felt as though he could say nothing to check them. Sinking into a chair, and burying her face in her handkerchief, she wept bitter, burning tears, with her head bowed upon the table. “Olga,” at length he said, “why, torture yourself in this way? You love me, and could never survive a parting. Take me, therefore, as I am, and love in me just so much as may be worthy of it.” Without raising her head, she made a gesture of refusal. “No, no,” she forced herself to gasp. “Nor need you fear for me and my grief. I know myself. I am merely weeping my heart out, and shall then weep no more. Do not hinder me, but go. God has punished me. Yet how it hurts, how it hurts!” Her sobs redoubled. “But suppose the pain should _not_ pass?” he said. “Suppose it should wreck your health? Tears like these are tears of poison. Olga, darling, do not weep. Forget the past.” “No, no; let me weep. I am weeping not so much for the future as for the past.” She could scarcely utter the words. “It was all so bright--but now it is gone! It is not I that am weeping; it is my memory--my memory of the summer, of the park--that is pouring out its grief. Do you remember those things? Yes, I am yearning for the avenue, and for the lilac that you gave me... They had struck their roots into my heart, and--and the plucking of them up is painful indeed!” In her despair she bowed her head, and sobbed again--repeating: “Oh, how it hurts! Oh, how it hurts!” “But suppose you were to die of this?” he said in sudden alarm. “Olga, Olga! Think a moment!”