I was too passionately in love with her to feel the sympathy on which she evidently counted in saying those words. A man can respect a woman's scruples when they appeal to him mutely in her looks or in her tears; but the formal expression of them in words only irritates or annoys him. "Whose fault is it that you suffer?" I retorted, coldly. "I ask you to make my life a happy one, and your life a happy one. You are a cruelly wronged woman, but you are not a degraded woman. You are worthy to be my wife, and I am ready to declare it publicly. Come back with me to England. My boat is waiting for you; we can set sail in two hours." She dropped into a chair; her hands fell helplessly into her lap. "How cruel!" she murmured, "how cruel to tempt me!" She waited a little, and recovered her fatal firmness. "No!" she said. "If I die in doing it, I can still refuse to disgrace you. Leave me, Mr. Germaine. You can show me that one kindness more. For God's sake, leave me!" I made a last appeal to her tenderness. "Do you know what my life is if I live without you?" I asked. "My mother is dead. There is not a living creature left in the world whom I love but you. And you ask me to leave you! Where am I to go to? what am I to do? You talk of cruelty! Is there no cruelty in sacrificing the happiness of my life to a miserable scruple of delicacy, to an unreasoning fear of the opinion of the world? I love you and you love me. There is no other consideration worth a straw. Come back with me to England! come back and be my wife!" She dropped on her knees, and taking my hand put it silently to her lips. I tried to raise her. It was useless: she steadily resisted me. "Does this mean No?" I asked. "It means," she said in faint, broken tones, "that I prize your honor beyond my happiness. If I marry you, your career is destroyed by your wife; and the day will come when you will tell me so. I can suffer--I can die; but I can _not_ face such a prospect as that. Forgive me and forget me. I can say no more!" She let go of my hand, and sank on the floor. The utter despair of that action told me, far more eloquently than the words which she had just spoken, that her resolution was immovable. She had deliberately separated herself from me; her own act had parted us forever. CHAPTER XXXVII. THE TWO DESTINIES. I MADE no movement to leave the room; I let no sign of sorrow escape me. At last, my heart was hardened against the woman who had so obstinately rejected me. I stood looking down at her with a merciless anger, the bare remembrance of which fills me at this day with a horror of myself. There is but one excuse for me. The shock of that last overthrow of the one hope that held me to life was more than my reason could endure. On that dreadful night (whatever I may have been at other times), I myself believe it, I was a maddened man. I was the first to break the silence. "Get up," I said coldly.