Then her recollected resolution comes back. "Let me go," she says, faintly; "this is not right!" "Right or wrong," he answers, doggedly, "it is the one moment worth being called 'life' that I have spent since I was fool enough to cut my own throat by parting from you." "Let me go!" she says, again; and he, holding her still prisoner, but putting her a little farther from him, that he may the more distinctly see the workings of her countenance, says steadily: "Essie, I am not unjust; I will let you go this instant, to any quarter of the world that you wish, without a word of remonstrance, if you will only look up in my face and say, 'St. John, I don't love you.'" She lifts, with infinite difficulty, eyes in which pride and shy passion are fighting a duel to the death, and falters: "St. John, I don't----" but, in the mid-utterance of that falsehood, her voice fails suddenly, and she buries her burning shamed face on his breast. "I knew it," he cries, triumphantly, dropping a light kiss--for has not her hesitation confessed him her owner?--upon her bent head. "I risked my everything upon that test, and it has not failed me. Even your miserable pride, Esther, could not constrain you to such a lie! With your heart beating against mine, as if we had but one between us, your lips did not dare frame those ugly words." She gives no verbal answer; but, with head shame-drooped, tries, with trembling hands, to push away the arms that so closely, warmly bind her. "Oh love!" he cries, with an accent of impatient but tender upbraiding, "are you struggling to get away from me still? Am I never to persuade any good thing to stay with me? Will you never forgive me the sin of being an eldest son? God knows it is not my fault--that it was not my choice to be born amongst the drones! Oh, Essie, is it just of you to punish me for what I cannot help?" "I don't wish to punish you," she answers, trembling (seeing that she wished to be away from him, he has released her from his arms). "The real way to punish you would be to let you have your will--to say, 'I will marry you, St. John!'" "In God's name punish me, then! No one ever took chastisement meeklier than I will this." "And what would the end be?" she asks, sadly. "You would be insanely happy for a little while--a month--two months, perhaps--and then you would get tired of me. There is nothing in me, I think," she says, simply, "to keep a man's love after the first madness is over: I never had anything but a pretty face, and now even that is gone in the eyes of every one but you." "What! in Linley's?" he asks, with a half-jealous smile. She blushes, but goes on, without heeding the enquiry. "Some day you would wake up and say, 'I have thrown myself away;' and I--I prefer to say it for you now, while it is yet time."