"This is Monday evening, and since Saturday, when I brought you from the cemetery, I have not once closed my eyes. If you continue to manifest this inconsolable grief for your sister's fate, I must break down in some way. Something will happen. I shall go crazy, I think." "You mean very kindly, I suppose," answered Violet, with lowered lids; "though I do not see--" "No, you cannot see, you do not know," said he, with a certain redness and strain in the eyes which made it a credible thing that he had not slept in some time. "But it is so. It has been the craving of my life to save you from this grief. Let me do it; you have to let me do it!" "How save me?" she asked, with an upward glance under her long lashes, while she wondered at the blaze in the man's eyes. "I am not to be saved from it by any means, though it will be lessened by the proofs of my sister's honor and of her child's fair name, and by the discovery of the whereabouts of the child. There are no other means." "Yes, there are! There is the leaving of your present life, the companionship of one who will have no care but to make you happy, to redress a little in you the wrong done to your sister. That is my motive--God knows!--that is my main motive--" "Surely I do not understand you aright!" cried Violet, somewhat dismayed by his outburst. "Your motive is to redress a wrong done by some one to my sister by devoting yourself to make me happy? Certainly, that seems a most nobly disinterested motive; but is philanthropy of this sort the best basis for the kind of proposition which you are making me? Philanthropy most certainly would wear thin in time, if it did not rest on affection--" "Do you doubt that I have affection?" he demanded, his voice vibrating with ill-repressed passion. "As an afterthought?" "How as an afterthought, when my life itself depends upon continually seeing you, and seeing you happy? I tell you that if you were to refuse my prayer this evening, if anything was to happen now or in the future to thwart my cravings with respect to you, my mind is made up, I would not continue to face the harrowing cark of life. Say 'No' to me, and from to-morrow evening you will be tortured by the same worm of remorse by which the man who caused the death of your sister must be gnawed and gnawed. You talk of affection? I have that. I do, yes, I do love you; but that would be the flimsiest motive compared with this passion which casts me at your feet." "I don't understand him," sighed Violet to herself--and no wonder, for Van Hupfeldt's words came from him in a sort of hiss; his eyes were bloodshot; he stooped close over her, with veins standing out on his forehead. It was clear enough that the man's soul was in this wooing, yet he made so little pretense of the ordinary lover's love. He left her cold, this woman made for love, and she wondered.