"It is not true. You, who are a man, say it. What woman ever said it? It is a lie, a lie! You shall not say it, you must not think it. You would make us creatures without souls indeed. Are they right, then, the Easterns? If when we women are sold, or stolen, or entrapped, we must love, and only then, you deny us other life than that of the earth. Of what man would you hold this doctrine to be true? It is utterly false! it is wicked! it is unworthy of you!" She moaned where she had fallen on the ground, and tried to speak again; but the man continued with a pitiless stream of words, sincere, earnest, spoken for her good as well as his own. "We have been loitering together for a time, child, on life’s way, and have chased the golden butterfly of pleasure which men oft mistake for love. Before we are too deeply entangled in the briers, we must turn from the chase, we must forget each other. We can be of no good, one to the other; and I will be no more harm to you than I have been." He could not see her face now; it was hidden on her arm as she crouched where his words had thrown her. The pathos of the attitude touched him; he gently lifted one of the tightly clinched hands, and loosened the fingers which so fiercely bit the delicate palm. He was in a strange mood, when heart and soul seemed absent from him, and only the clear, strong brain prompted his words. Her passionate grief hardened rather than softened the look in his eyes. This girl, who had been as wax in his fingers,--glad when he smiled, weeping when he sighed, swayed invariably by the mood which possessed him,--now denied by piteous word and gesture the words which he was speaking. Her hand, unlocked by him, would have clasped his stronger palm; but at the caress he dropped her arm and turned his eyes from her. "I cannot give you up," she murmured; "you must not leave me so. Oh, my love, you wrong me, you wrong yourself! I love you, Graham, with all my soul; I love you as I never thought to love before! Cruel--cruel! It is not with lips and eyes that I have loved you, for you could lose that, and yet miss nothing from your life. Turn not from me, if you would not leave that which is best worth having by the roadside, and press on to find that goal towards which your ambition spurs you, empty and void without me at your side! It is your worse nature which doubts mine. Graham, Graham! what matters it if hand and eyes have been another’s? My soul is only yours, wakened first when your strong spirit called it from the sleep begun before it was vested in this body, ere it was divided from your own."