“Oh! Tony! Tony! cannot you read the truth? I love you, dear, I love you! I never loved any creature in this world before I loved you. I did not know that it was given to mortals to love so much! And my love has opened my eyes! Sooner than injure you, whom I would die to save from harm, I will separate myself from you! I will give you up! I will live my lonely life without you, I could do that, but I can never, never consent to sap your manhood and your brains, which do not belong to me but to the world, and see you wither, like a poisoned plant, the leaves of which lie discoloured and dead upon the garden path.”
Never in the course of their acquaintanceship had Harriet Brandt seemed so sweet, so pathetic, so unselfish to Anthony Pennell as then. If he had resolved not to resign her from the first, he did so a thousand times more now. He threw his arms around her kneeling figure and lowered his head until it lay upon the crown of her dusky hair.
“My darling! my darling! my own sweet girl!” he murmured, “our destinies are interwoven for ever! No one and nothing shall come between us! You cannot give me up unless you have my consent to doing so. I hold your sacred promise to become my wife, and I shall not release you from it!”
“But if I harmed you?” she said fearfully.
“I do not believe in the possibility of your harming me,” he replied, “but if I am to die, which is what I suppose you mean, I claim my right to die in your arms. But whenever it happens, you will have neither hastened, nor retarded it!”
“Oh! if I could only think so!” she murmured.
“You must! Why cannot you trust my judgment as much as that of Madame Gobelli or old Phillips—a couple of mischief-makers. And now, Hally, when shall it be?”
“When shall ‘what’ be?” she whispered.
“You know what I mean as well as I do! When shall we be married? We have no one to consult but ourselves! I am my own master and you are alone in the world! These things are very easily managed, you know. I have but to go to Doctors’ Commons for a special license to enable us to be married at a registrar’s office to-morrow. Shall it be to-morrow, love?”
“Oh! no! no! I could not make up my mind so soon!”