"You are like all your sex," he says, in a low deep voice of intense wrath, but a voice that makes her quiver with the mingled rapture, dread, and fear of its memories. "Truth and constancy are unknown to you. Did I need any sign or word to keep me true? No. I said I loved you, and would love you to my life's end; and so I shall, God help me! Oh, child! why have you done this?" "I was driven to it," says the girl desperately. "You cannot understand--you never would, if I spent hours in telling you--how it has all come about. Oh, how I hate myself!--and yet---- Oh, Keith, say you forgive me! Let us part friends. Don't break my heart with your reproaches. In the life before me I shall have misery enough to bear. Give me some kind word now." "I will not," he says fiercely. "I would not be such a hypocrite. I could almost hate you, only that I know I love you too much for that yet. But I will not be hypocrite enough to say I forgive you, or wish you well, or any such d----d humbug." "Keith!" bursts from the pale, trembling lips. "Yes, I mean it," he goes on more wildly, for her beauty maddens him, and he is longing with all the wildest and most passionate longing of his hot-blooded southern nature to fold that lovely figure in his arms, to rain kisses on the sweet quivering lips, to call her his--his own--his love, though a hundred laws of right and honour barred the way. "I mean it--and I hope my misery will haunt your life, brought as it is by your own hand. To-day you have killed the best part of me. Whatever happens in the future lies at your door." "Do not say that," she implores. "I will. If I go to the dogs you have driven me there, and you know it. I have loved you since I was a boy--since we played together in our childhood. I have been cold to all temptations, to all that would make me less worthy of you, simply because that love lay like a charm upon my heart and kept all evil away. I have worked and toiled, and now, when Fortune smiles--when even your mercenary mother might be content with my prospects--I come to claim you and find you--married. By heaven, Lauraine, I could strangle you, as you stand there with your innocent face looking back to mine, and fling you dead into the arms of the brute who has bought you!" "Oh! cease for pity's sake," implored the girl, and her hands go up to her face and shut out that angry one before her, with the lightning-flashes of wrath in the blue eyes, and that agony of soul in every quivering feature. "If you only knew how sorry I am--how I pity you--myself----" Her voice breaks. For a moment everything is forgotten--her strange absence--her mother's uneasiness--the wondering comments of the guests--of these she never thinks. Just for one single moment they stand face to face, and soul to soul, and see before them the awful shipwreck of two young despairing lives!