"You shall not make me believe that you do not despise him. I have watched you both carefully from the first day that I have visited your house. Do not deceive me, do not attempt to deceive yourself. You do not love your husband. I have seen how your noble heart has shrunk from contact with so sordid a nature, as his has proved to be in the past few months. He may have loved you once in his cool, jellyfish fashion; perhaps you have loved him yourself, but since his new craze for wealth has ousted you from his consideration, except when you are useful to him as a bait, you have hated him--ah, worse than that, you have despised him. You know that he is not worthy of you, who have the soul as well as the body of an angel. No, you are not blind; you are not a child, to sit down tamely under his treatment of you. Be a woman, take a woman's revenge. Only give me a tithe of the love he has held so lightly and I will be your slave, your adoring slave to my dying day. Dora, I love you," he cried as he advanced towards her. "I can listen to no more of this. You have tried my patience too far already. I thank you, in my husband's name, General, for having signed this paper; but I don't feel well,--have pity on me. You have before you a woman full of gratitude for what you have done; it would not be generous to take advantage of it to press your company upon me in my present state. Leave me now, please." "Leave you! leave you! Ah, ah! And this is my reward? Now that you have obtained all you want, you dismiss me. Dora, take care. You are too intelligent, too much of a woman, not to see that my love for you has come back to me redoubled, that it blinds me, makes me mad, and that your resistance only adds fuel to the fire." "Go, I beseech you, at once," exclaimed Dora, now thoroughly alarmed; "go, I command you. Nothing will force me to listen to you any longer--I tell you I am suffering tortures; you say that you love me, then, spare me and go." "So, then," said he reproachfully, "you let me see you, let me come here almost day after day until I cannot live away from you, and then, when you have done your despicable husband's work, you dismiss me with a _many thanks, good-bye_. No, Dora," he added, raising his voice, "I will not be dismissed so. Look at me well," he said, seizing her arm; "do I look like a man who can be so lightly played with?" "Let me go; you hurt me," cried Dora, distracted with indignation; "how dare you treat me so?"