"You would cast your lot with his, Madeleine? If he were poor, you would share his poverty? You would even abandon your dream of earning a fortune for yourself,—and I know how dear that dream is to your heart,—for his sake? You would do this were there no barrier to the avowal of your love,—no barrier to your union with him?"
"I would."
"And that barrier is the opposition of his proud relatives?" asserted Maurice.
Madeleine started, looked in his face in alarm; for the first time, the suspicion that he had divined her secret, flashed upon her.
But Maurice went on unpityingly,—
"You refused him your hand because you thought it base ingratitude to those relatives who had sheltered you in your orphan and unprotected condition, and who had other, as they supposed, higher views for him. You feared by letting him know that you loved him to injure his future prospects, and you nearly blighted that future by the despair you caused him when he lost you. And since you have been restored, at least to his sight, you have with a martyr's heroism adhered to your plan of self-sacrifice because you thought that to relinquish it would draw down upon him and yourself the wrath of his haughty grandmother,—I will not say of his father; because, too, you believed that you would be accused of ingratitude. And you have allowed him to suffer unimaginable torture rather than acknowledge that the lover to whom you have been so true,—the lover for whom you have sacrificed yourself,—the lover most unworthy of you (save through that love which renders the humblest worthy),—is the man you rejected in the Château de Gramont at the risk of breaking his heart."
Madeleine dropped her face upon her hands with a low sob, but Maurice drew the hands away, and folding his arms about her said, fervently,—
"Madeleine, my own, my best beloved, it is too late for concealment now! I know whom you love,—it is too late for denial. Look at me and tell me once,—tell me only once that it is true you do love me; tell me this, and it will repay me for all I have suffered."
But Madeleine did not yield to his prayer; she tried to extricate herself from his arms, but they clasped her too tightly; and when she could speak she said, through her tears,—
"You ensnared me,—you entrapped me to this! I should never have told you! And what does it avail,—I can never be your wife."