"Mr. Montague," returned the lady, with great apparent coolness--though in reality she was inflicting excruciating tortures upon her own heart; "no power on earth can alter my resolves. We shall part--here--now--and for ever and may happiness and prosperity attend you." "But Mr. Stephens?" cried Montague: "what can you say to him? what will he think?" "He shall never know the truth from _me_," answered Walter solemnly. "This is absurd!" ejaculated Montague, in despair at the imminent ruin of all his hopes. "Will not my humblest apology--my sincerest excuses--my future conduct,--will nothing atone for one false step, committed under the influence of generous wines and of a passion which obtained a complete mastery over me? Will nothing move your forgiveness?" "Nothing," answered Walter, with unvaried coolness and determination. "Were I a young girl of sixteen or seventeen, it might be different: _then_ I might be deceived by your sophistry. _Now_ it is impossible! I am five and twenty years old; and circumstances," she added, glancing over her male attire, "have also tended to augment my experience in the sinuosities of human designs and the phases of the human heart." "Yes--you are twenty-five, it is true," cried Montague; "but that age has not robbed your charms of any of the grace and freshness of youth. Oh! then let your mind be cautious how it adopts the severe notions of riper years!" "I thank you for the compliment which you pay me," said Walter, satirically; "and I can assure you that it does not prove a welcome preface to the argument which you would found upon it. Old or young--experienced or ignorant in the ways of the world--a woman were a fool to marry where she could not entertain respect for her husband. I may be wrong: but this is my conviction;--and upon it will I act." "This is but an excuse to break with me," said Montague: "you no longer love me." "No--not as I did twelve hours ago." "You never loved me! It is impossible to divest oneself of that passion so suddenly as this." "Love in my mind is a species of worship or adoration, and can be damaged by the evil suspicions that may suddenly be thrown upon its object." "No--that is not love," exclaimed Montague, passionately: "true love will make a woman follow her lover or her husband through all the most hideous paths of crime--even to the scaffold." "The woman who truly loves, will follow her husband as a duty, but not her lover to countenance him in his crimes. We are not, however, going to argue this point:--for my part, I am not acting according to the prescribed notions of romances or a false sentimentality, but strictly in accordance with my own idea of what is suitable to my happiness and proper to my condition. I repeat, I am not the heroine of a novel in her teens--I am a woman of a certain age, and can reflect calmly in order to act decidedly."