"I beg you--" said von Stielow, feeling quite distracted. "Why these declarations about the past, now? Why this painful scene?"
"You are right," she replied, and a proud flash shone in her eyes without dispersing the melancholy that veiled them, "you are right. I ought not to touch upon that past, but there is a nearer past of which I must speak, which leads me hither."
"But--" said von Stielow.
Without heeding him she continued:
"Before you, I had no longer pride, no longer a will, it is true; but you coldly and cruelly forsook me"--she placed her hand upon her heart, and pressed her lips together. "You humiliated me, and my pride again arose. I wished to hate you, to forget you," she added in a hoarse voice: "but all the nobler feelings of my heart rebelled against it. I could not do it," she said in trembling tones; "and my pride said, 'Though he no longer loves, he shall not despise!'"
Herr von Stielow's face had grown calm. He looked at her coldly, a scarcely perceptible smile upon his lips.
"You had a right," she added, "it is true, to think me false, and to believe yourself the toy of a coquettish whim, perhaps even worse; you shall believe it no more, the memory of me shall not be mingled with contempt."
"Let us leave the past," said he; "I assure you--"
"No," she cried vehemently, "you shall hear me,--if the past gives me no other right, it gives me this, to demand a hearing!"
He was silent.