"Perhaps," was her reply; "but listen. I have said you don't deceive yourself, and I mean it. I know you love me; I know what perfect sincerity there is in you--hush! let me speak--and I--I do love you--you have not mistaken me, I have not misled you."
"Then what does anything else matter?" said Miles, and he caught her hands and kissed them unresisted, unrebuked. "With that assurance, Grace, surely you will not refuse me?"
"I must," she answered. "Have patience with me. I will tell you why. It is for your own sake."
"My own sake!" he exclaimed passionately; "you deprive me of all hope and happiness for my own sake! I shall need patience indeed to understand that."
"It is true, nevertheless. I could not many you, Miles Challoner, without doing you a great injury; and I love you too well, much more and better than myself, to do that. Take that assurance, and believe that nothing can shake my determination. My fate is decided, my way of life is quite fixed. I shall never be your wife, never, never, never!"--his face was hidden in his hands, he did not see the suffering which broke all control and showed itself plainly in her every feature--"but I shall never love you less, or anyone but you." The low distinct tones of her voice thrilled him with a horrid sense of hopelessness. She spoke as one who had taken an irrevocable resolution.
"What do you mean?" he said. "You must tell me more than this. What do you mean by doing me an injury? I protest I have not the faintest notion of your meaning. It cannot be--" He hesitated, and she took up his words.
"Because you are a gentleman of old name and a responsible position in society, and I am a singer, an actress a woman with no name and no station, you would say. Yes, it is precisely for this cause, which you think impossible. I know you don't regard any of these things, but the world does; and the man I love shall never be censured by the world for me."
How well it was, she thought, how fortunate, that such a real genuine difficulty did exist; that she could give some explanation which he might be induced to receive.
"Then you would make me wretched for the sake of the world, even if what you say of my position and your own were true? And it is not. Is your genius nothing? Is your fame nothing? I speak now as reasonably as yourself; not as a man who holds you peerless, far removed above all the world, but as one discussing a question open to argument. What am I in comparison to the men who would be proud to offer you rank and wealth? What have I to give you that others could not give a thousandfold?"
"You give me all I value, all I care for," she said; "but I must not take it. You must not, you shall not, deceive yourself. My genius, as you call it, my fame, are real things in their way and in their sphere, but they are not of any account in yours. Ask your friend Lord Sandilands; he is a kind friend to me also, and a man who knows the world thoroughly; and he will tell you I am right."