"Ay,"—slowly,—"you shrink from hearing your thoughts put into words."
"Not my thoughts," protests he, vehemently.
"No?" searchingly, drawing a step nearer him. "Are you sure? Have you never wished our grandfather dead?"
"I may have wished it," confesses he, reluctantly, as though compelled to frankness, "but to compass my wish—to——"
"If you have wished it you have murdered," returns she, with conviction. "You have craved his death: what is that but unuttered crime? There is little difference; it is but one step the more in the same direction. And I,—in what way am I the greater sinner? I have but said aloud what you whisper to your heart."
"Be silent," cries he, fiercely. "All your sophistry fails to make me a partner in your guilt."
"I am the honester of the two," she goes on, rapidly, unheeding his anger. "As long as the accursed thing is unspoken, you see no harm in it; once it makes itself heard, you start and sicken, because it hurts your tender susceptibilities. Yet hear me, Philip." Suddenly changing her tone of passionate scorn to one of entreaty as passionate, "Do not cast me off for a few idle words. They have done no harm. Let us be as we were."
"Impossible," replies he coldly, unloosing her fingers from his arm, all the dislike and loathing of which he is capable compressed into the word. "You have destroyed my trust in you."
A light that means despair flashes across Marcia's face as she stands in all her dark but rather evil beauty before him; then suddenly she falls upon her knees.
"Philip, have pity on me!" she cries painfully. "I love you,—I have only you. Here in this house I am alone, a stranger in my own land. Do not you too turn from me. Ah! you should be the last to condemn, for if I dreamed of sin it was for your sake. And after all, what did I say? The thought that this girl's coming might upset the dream of years agitated me, and I spoke—I—but I meant nothing—nothing." She drags herself on her knees nearer to him and attempts to take his hand. "Darling, do not be so stern. Forgive me. If you cast me off, Philip, you will kill not only my body, but all that is good in me."