Still Gerard remains speechless--not from obstinacy, but because he cannot command his voice: and his pride revolts from speaking shakily, quaveringly, like an hysterical woman or paralytic old man. "If I were a thief, or a murderer!" she says, indignantly, withdrawing her hands, "you could not turn from me with greater loathing!" "You are a murderer!" he answers, with fierce vehemence, looking at her once again as she had asked him--looking at her with wrathful, reluctant passion, but not kindly. "You have murdered my whole future--my hope, my belief in women, in truth--my everything of life but what is merely animal. If you had murdered my body I could have forgiven you much more easily. Time or disease must have done that sooner or later, but now--" He stops abruptly. "If I am a murderer, I am a suicide too," she replies, with a smile more tearful than her tears. "St. John," she says, earnestly, "don't you know that people always attend to dying requests, however foolish and unreasonable they may be? This of mine is a dying request, for after to-night I shall be dead to you. Say, 'Essie, I forgive you.'" "What is it to you whether I forgive you or not?" he inquires, sullenly, with a certain savage pulling and biting of his moustache. "Are you mistaking me for Brandon again? Why should two indifferent acquaintances like us go through the farce of begging each other's pardons? What are we to one another?" "Nothing," she answers, calmly; "you need not be so eager to remind me of that; my memory needs no refreshing; but we _have been_ something--do what you will you cannot take that away from me--so for the sake of that 'have been,' say you forgive me!" "Falsehoods don't pass my lips so glibly as they do yours," he answers, doggedly. "If I were to say, 'I forgive you' a thousand times, I should be no nearer the doing it. Good-bye!" he says again, abruptly, putting out his hand; feeling that the strain is too great for him, and that if it last much longer he, being but human, will break under it. Her answering farewell is to fling herself upon his breast. "I can no more say 'good-bye,'" she says, desperately, in a passionate whisper, "than you can say 'I forgive you.' St. John, take me back, try me once again! I know I ought not to say it--that it is undignified, unwomanly, perhaps--but I cannot see my everything going away from me without reaching out a hand to stop it. Oh, my darling! give me one more trial!" Her arms cling about his brown throat close as the bindweed clings about the hedges in sultry August; her white warm breast heaves and pants against his, as the sea heaves and pants against the shore's tawny sides; her eyes, impassioned as only dark eyes can be--alluring, despairing--flame into his eyes, and down through his eyes into his heart. Prisoned in those sweet, frail fetters, he feels strength and name and fame ebbing from him, as Merlin's ebbed under Vivien's wily charm.