“Forgive me, Salome, if the pain I endure rendered me harsh or unjust. My dearest, I did not intend to wound you, but indeed you are cruel sometimes.”
“Yes; truth is the most savagely cruel of all rude, jagged weapons, and leaves ugly gashes and quivering nerves exposed, and these are the hurts that never cicatrize—that gape and bleed while the heart throbs to feed them.”
“Tell me candidly whether the heart I covet belongs to that Mr. Granville, who paid you such devoted attention in Paris.”
A short, scornful, mirthless laugh rang sharply on the air, and turning quickly, Salome exclaimed contemptuously,—
“I said I loved a man,—a true, honest, brave, noble man,—not that perfumed, unprincipled, vain, foppish automaton, who adorns a corner of the diplomatic apartment where attachés of the American embassy ‘most do congregate’! Gerard Granville is unworthy of any woman’s affection, for maugre the indisputable fact that he is betrothed to a fond, trusting girl, now in the United States, he had the effrontery to attempt to offer his addresses to me. If an honest man be the noblest work of God, then, beyond all peradventure, the disgrace of creation is centred in an unscrupulous one, such as I have the honor to pronounce Mr. Granville.”
Seizing her hands, Mr. Minge carried them forcibly to his lips, and said, in a voice that faltered from intensity of feeling,—
“Is it the hope that your love is reciprocated which bars your heart so sternly against my pleadings? Spare me no pangs,—tell me all.”
She freed her fingers from his grasp, and retreating a few steps, answered with a passionate mournfulness which he never forgot,—
“If I were dowered with that precious hope, not all the crown jewels in Christendom and Heathendom could purchase it. Not the proudest throne on that continent of empires that lies yonder to the north, could woo me one hour from the only kingdom where I could happily reign,—the heart of the man I love. No—no—no! That hope is as distant as the first star up there above us, which has rent the blue veil of heaven to gaze pityingly at me; and I would as soon expect to catch that silver sparkle and fold it in my arms as dream that my affection could ever be returned. The only man I shall ever love could not bend his noble, regal nature to the level of mine, and towers beyond me, a pinnacle of unapproachable purity and perfection. Ah, indeed, he is one of those concerning whom it has been grandly said: ‘The truly great stand upright as columns of the temple whose dome covers all,—against whose pillared sides multitudes lean, at whose base they kneel in times of trouble.’ Mr. Minge, it is despair that crouches at my heart, not hope that shuts its portals against your earnest petition; for a barrier wider, deeper than a hundred oceans divides me from my idol, who loves, and ere this, is the husband of another.”