She was sorry for him, of course, but it would be kinder if she put him at once in his place and made him understand the hopelessness of his position.
"Do you hear?" he said hoarsely, his voice quivering from suppressed emotion. "I want you—I want you to be my wife!"
Grace drew herself up with the air of offended dignity of a queen hurt in her pride. Her gown was in tatters, her lovely hair hung loose over her snow-white shoulders. With her cheeks slightly flushed and her large dark eyes dilated and more lustrous from excitement, never had she appeared to him more beautiful or desirable. Like a trembling felon at the dock waiting to hear the judge pronounce his fate, Armitage waited for her answer.
"Your wife?" she replied not unkindly. "Do you know what I am, do you realize what position I hold in society? Don't you know that my father is one of America's kings of finance, that his fortune is twenty millions, and that our winter and summer homes are among the show-places of Fifth Avenue and Newport? Don't you know that I spend $10,000 a year on my dress, that I have a dozen servants to run at my call, that my carriages, my horses, gowns and jewels furnish endless material for the society reporters of the yellow journals? Men have proposed to me—men of means, men of my own class. I refused them all because they hadn't money enough." With a scornful toss of her head, she added: "I despise a husband who looks to his wife for support."
Armitage had listened patiently until now, but her last words aroused him. Suddenly interrupting her, he broke in:
"You refused them not because they weren't rich enough, but because you didn't love them. You can't deceive me. I haven't watched and studied you all these weeks for nothing. You aren't as shallow and heartless as you pretend. You are too intelligent to find pleasure in Society's inane pastimes. You admitted to me yourself that something seemed lacking in your life. Shall I tell you what it is?"
He advanced closer and, looking fixedly at her, went on:
"I can read the secret in your beautiful eyes—the windows of your soul. Shall I tell you what your heart desires? You are love-hungry. Your whole being cries out for love. Not the infamous traffic in flesh and honor which receives the blessing of fashionable churches, but the pure, true, unselfish, ideal love that thrills a man and woman under God's free sky. What good are your father's millions here? What do I care about your houses, your gowns and your jewels? Here, stripped of everything but your own sweet lovable nature, you are only a woman—a woman I love and want to call mine own."
His voice held her spellbound. The tone of authority in his words weakened her will-power. His ardent eyes, looking tenderly into hers, fascinated her. She felt that the odds were fearfully against her. It required all her moral strength to resist his pleading, yet there was nothing here to which she could cling. At home, in New York, she could take refuge behind a hundred excuses. The polite conventions of society would lend her support. But here alone on this lonely island with this man whom she knew in her heart she loved, this man who insisted on frank explanations, straightforward answers, the odds were fearfully against her. She felt herself weakening.
"Please don't," she murmured confusedly. "It's utterly impossible. Don't you see how impossible it is—even if I did care for you? In a short time a ship will come. We shall be taken off. We shall go back to New York. Each of us will resume the old life, and this adventure will be only a memory."