With a low cry she tore herself from his hold and sank down upon the rustic seat.
“Ah, don’t tempt me!” she wailed, despairingly, with her face buried in her hands. “You don’t know what you are saying. Why do you tempt me like this? It is not fair, it is not manly of you.”
The first words of reproach he had ever heard pass her lips—and they were addressed to him!
“I want to save two lives from shipwreck,” he said. “Yours and mine.”
“Then listen,” she said, sitting up, and for the first time speaking firmly. “You must forget all this—you must forget me—hate me, if you will, for having brought you to this. I told you from the first that I could give you no hope whatever, and yet I was selfish enough to ask you to undertake a one-sided bargain. All through, I have been deceiving you, more and more. Think me utterly heartless—but forget me. And you—you have urged me to break a sacred promise for you,” she went on in a hard, dry, monotonous voice, as unlike her usual tones as it was possible to be. “Arthur Claverton, I have treated you shamefully. You will always; look back upon my memory with the scorn and contempt it deserves; but on one point you are wrong: I do not love you!”
“You do.”
The answer came quietly and confidently, as if he had been setting her right upon some trivial point under discussion.
She looked up at him with burning, tearless eyes; for she wae about to pluck her very heart out.
“What! you refuse to believe me? I must have sunk low in your estimation. I have told you the truth, and—and—you must leave me. Will you?” she went on, speaking fast in her fear lest she should break down in the act of sacrifice. “Will you go quite away until I leave this place? It will only be for a few days now, and it will be best for both of us. Will you do this for me?”
“No.”