"My real nature," she repeated with a half savage vehemence that seemed to be goaded from her by his very gentleness, "my real nature! What did HE--what do YOU know of it?--My real nature!--I'll tell you what it was," she went on passionately. "It was to be revenged on you all for your cruelty, your heartlessness, your wickedness to me and mine in the past. It was to pay you off for your slanders of my dead father--for the selfishness that left me and Jim alone with his dead body on the Marsh. That was what sent me to Logport--to get even with you--to--to fool and flaunt you! There, you have it now! And now that God has punished me for it by crushing my brother--you--you expect me to let you crush ME too." "But," he said eagerly, advancing toward her, "you are wronging me--you are wronging yourself, cruelly." "Stop," she said, stepping back, with her hands still locked behind her. "Stay where you are. There! That's enough!" She drew herself up and let her hands fall at her side. "Now, let us speak of Jim," she said coldly. Without seeming to hear her, he regarded her for the first time with hopeless sadness. "Why did you let my brother believe you were his rival with Cicely Preston?" she asked impatiently. "Because I could not undeceive him without telling him I hopelessly loved his sister. You are proud, Miss Culpepper," he said, with the first tinge of bitterness in his even voice. "Can you not understand that others may be proud too?" "No," she said bluntly; "it is not pride but weakness. You could have told him what you knew to be true: that there could be nothing in common between her folk and such savages as we; that there was a gulf as wide as that Marsh and as black between our natures, our training and theirs, and even if they came to us across it, now and then, to suit their pleasure, light and easy as that tide--it was still there to some day ground and swamp them! And if he doubted it, you had only to tell him your own story. You had only to tell him what you have just told me--that you yourself, an officer and a gentleman, thought you loved me, a vulgar, uneducated, savage girl, and that I, kinder to you than you to me or him, made you take it back across that tide, because I couldn't let you link your life with me, and drag you in the mire." "You need not have said that, Miss Culpepper," returned Calvert with the same gentle smile, "to prove that I am your inferior in all but one thing." "And that?" she said quickly. "Is my love." His gentle face was as set now as her own as he moved back slowly towards the door. There he paused.