"Do not look so coldly and scornfully upon me! Since you came to New Orleans, you have changed all my life. I never loved before. I married Monsieur Lorraine for wealth and position, without a single heart-throb for the man. But you I love, you I have sworn to win. What is there unreasonable about it, that your eyes flash so proudly? You are handsome, it is true, but I also am beautiful. You are gifted, but you are poor, while I am rolling in wealth. I can take you from your drudging life and make your existence a dream of luxury and ease. That is generous, is it not? But you have bewitched me; you have changed all my nature; you have taught me to love." "I never tried to do so," he replied, with unmoved coldness. "Cold-hearted Yankee! have you no feeling, no pity?" she demanded, reproachfully. "Look at me fairly," plucking impatiently at his sleeve. "Am I not fair enough to teach you to love me?" "No," he answered, curtly, shrinking from her touch, but looking straight into her impassioned eyes with cold, unmoved gray orbs. "Perhaps you already love some one else?" she burst forth, jealously. "No," in a cold, incisive voice. A low laugh of triumph broke from her, and she exclaimed: "Then I will not give you up. You shall be my husband." He gave her an angry stare, but she continued, unheeding: "To-night I leave New Orleans with my servant Mima. I have my reasons for this step. _N'importe_; they concern not you. I have made up my mind to be your wife, to bear your name, to go home with you to Boston. If you say the word, a priest shall be brought within the hour to make us one. Then we can escape together to-night and fly this fatal city which now holds imminent danger for you. Do you consent?" He looked with his cold, disconcerting gaze full into her eyes. "What if I refuse?" he queried. "You are a Yankee all over--you answer one question with another," she said, with a faint, mirthless laugh. "But my alternative is so bitter I shrink from naming it. Tell me, are you going to make me your loving wife?" "I would die first!" he responded, with passionate emphasis. She looked up at him, pale with wrath and mortification, and hissed, angrily: "You have chosen well, for it will come to that--to--to death!" "You would murder me?" he exclaimed, with a start; and she answered, defiantly: "If you can not be mine, no one else shall ever have your love or your name. If you persist in refusing my generous offer, I shall go away from here with Mima to-night; but I shall leave you in this cellar to starve and to die, and to molder into dust until the story of your mysterious disappearance that night has been forgotten of men." "You could not be so inhuman!" he uttered, with paling lips. "I can, and I will," laughing mockingly. "Take your choice now, monsieur--my time is limited. Shall it be love--or--death?" With ineffable scorn, although his handsome features had waned to a marble pallor, he replied, in a voice of proud disdain: