“Oh, I cannot bear it!” she suddenly exclaimed, taking my hands in both hers. “Let me open my heart to you now. Forgive me, Richard, for being so angry with you, but I did not know the General had said such a thing. Believe me, he imagines more than he knows. When you took me in your arms and held me against your breast it was a revelation to me. I cannot love or give my hand to any other man. You are everything in the world to me now, Richard; must you leave me to mingle in this cruel civil strife in which all my dearest friends and relations have perished.” She had had her revelation; I now had mine, and it was an exceedingly bitter one. I trembled at the thought of confessing my secret to her, now when she had so unmistakably responded to the passion I had insanely revealed. Suddenly she raised her dark, luminous eyes to mine, anger and shame struggling for mastery on her pale face. “Speak, Richard!” she exclaimed. “Your silence at this moment is an insult to me.” “For God's sake, have mercy on me, Dolores,” I said. “I am not free--I have a wife.” For some moments she sat staring fixedly at me, then, flinging my hand from her, covered her face. Presently she uncovered it again, for shame was overcome and cast out by anger. She rose and stood up before me, her face very white. “You have a wife--a wife whose existence you concealed from me till this moment!” she said. “Now you ask for mercy when your secret has been wrung from you! Married, and you have dared to take me in your arms, to excuse yourself afterwards with the plea of passion! Passion--do you know what it means, traitor? Ah, no; a breast like yours cannot know any great or generous emotion. Would you have dared show your face to me again had you been capable of shame even? And you judged my heart as shallow as your own, and, after treating me in that way, thought to win my forgiveness, and admiration even, by parading before me with a sword! Leave me, I can feel nothing but contempt for you. Go; you are a disgrace to the cause you have espoused!” I had sat utterly crushed and humiliated, not daring even to raise my sight to her face, for I felt that my own unspeakable weakness and folly had brought this tempest upon me! But there is a limit to patience, even in the most submissive mood; and when that was overpassed, then my anger blazed out all the more hotly for the penitential meekness I had preserved during the whole interview. Her words from the first had fallen like whip-cuts, making me writhe with the pain they inflicted; but that last taunt stung me beyond endurance. I, an Englishman, to be told that I was a disgrace to the Blanco cause, which I had joined, in spite of my better judgment, purely out of my romantic devotion to this very woman! I too was now upon my feet, and there face to face we stood for some moments, silent and trembling. At length I found my speech.