She was shaken by the storm of sobs in which her words ended. She got hold of his feet and refused to rise when he attempted to lift her. Her long hair, escaped from its stilletto, fell about her face. Even in this agitated moment the sculptor in Grant Herman noted with a sharp, aesthetic pleasure the beautiful curves of her neck and shoulders. "Pity," she went on between her agonized sobs. "Oh, forgive me! I will do any thing you wish. I will go away and leave you." He stooped and raised her by main force, yet tenderly. "There, there, Ninitta," he said, "I was wrong. I do believe you are a good girl; but you should not have played the spy." He soothed her as well as he was able, her violence spending itself in passionate tears. She drew herself away from him, and sat down again in the chair she had been occupying. She put up her hands to her head, twisting the loose tresses into a great coil. The sleeve of her dress, unfastened in her agitation, fell back from her rounded arm. The superb lines of her figure were displayed by her attitude. Her face, flushed with weeping and lighted by the still tear-wet eyes, if not beautiful, was appealing and pitiful. Some fiber touched of old vibrated anew in his being. He made a step forward. "Ninitta," he said, "I came to-night to ask you to marry me at once; to fulfill the promise I made you so long ago." The words and the tone both were tender, but he had said those same words in anger just before. "But you do not love me," she responded, her arms dropping pathetically into her lap. "You have said it." "But I was angry," answered Herman, for the moment almost believing that his old love was re-awakened. "I did not mean you to believe it." "If you do love me," she said, a new look coming into her eyes, "you will promise me never to see her again." He started back as if from a blow. His frail dream of passion was shattered like a bubble at her words. A wave of bitter self-contempt that its existence had been possible swept over him. The blood surged into his cheeks. Ninitta saw the flush and her eye kindled. "Promise me," she repeated. "It is little for love to ask. It is my right." With instinctive feminine guile she leaned towards him in an attitude so beautiful, so appealing that even now he was moved. But with this emotion came, too, a subtle if now fainter sense of degradation that he was susceptible to this dangerous fascination, with a painful consciousness of how wide a moral gulf had opened between them by the anger and vulgar jealousy which Ninitta displayed. It is not impossible, too, that his instinctive clinging to Helen was a stronger power than he knew; while still through all his mingled emotions ran the resolve he had made to give himself up to his old betrothed. "No," he said; yet as he moved slowly towards the door he had the air of a man who still deliberates.