“It is unnatural, it is horrible. Maggie, if you loved me as I love you, we should throw everything else to the winds for the sake of belonging to each other. We should break all these mistaken ties that were made in blindness, and determine to marry each other.” “I would rather die than fall into that temptation,” said Maggie, with deep, slow distinctness, all the gathered spiritual force of painful years coming to her aid in this extremity. She drew her arm from his as she spoke. “Tell me, then, that you don’t care for me,” he said, almost violently. “Tell me that you love some one else better.” It darted through Maggie’s mind that here was a mode of releasing herself from outward struggle,—to tell Stephen that her whole heart was Philip’s. But her lips would not utter that, and she was silent. “If you do love me, dearest,” said Stephen, gently, taking her hand again and laying it within his arm, “it is better—it is right that we should marry each other. We can’t help the pain it will give. It is come upon us without our seeking; it is natural; it has taken hold of me in spite of every effort I have made to resist it. God knows, I’ve been trying to be faithful to tacit engagements, and I’ve only made things worse; I’d better have given way at first.” Maggie was silent. If it were _not_ wrong—if she were once convinced of that, and need no longer beat and struggle against this current, soft and yet strong as the summer stream! “Say ‘yes,’ dearest,” said Stephen, leaning to look entreatingly in her face. “What could we care about in the whole world beside, if we belonged to each other?” Her breath was on his face, his lips were very near hers, but there was a great dread dwelling in his love for her. Her lips and eyelids quivered; she opened her eyes full on his for an instant, like a lovely wild animal timid and struggling under caresses, and then turned sharp round toward home again. “And after all,” he went on, in an impatient tone, trying to defeat his own scruples as well as hers, “I am breaking no positive engagement; if Lucy’s affections had been withdrawn from me and given to some one else, I should have felt no right to assert a claim on her. If you are not absolutely pledged to Philip, we are neither of us bound.” “You don’t believe that; it is not your real feeling,” said Maggie, earnestly. “You feel, as I do, that the real tie lies in the feelings and expectations we have raised in other minds. Else all pledges might be broken, when there was no outward penalty. There would be no such thing as faithfulness.” Stephen was silent; he could not pursue that argument; the opposite conviction had wrought in him too strongly through his previous time of struggle. But it soon presented itself in a new form.