"Loved!" she repeated, with an accent of chill and wondering scorn.
"Yes, loved!" The words were almost a cry: they held fierce protest, even anger, yet there was in them a kind of appeal that lent them a sombre and tragic dignity. "But you despised me! You had stood first of all things. But if you could be nothing to me, then the game I played stood second. I played, as always, to win. The cards fell oddly—your father's letters, no matter how, came into my hands. They were to my purpose, and I would have used them. Why should I hold back? Out of regard for him? I regard no man!"
"Yet he is my father. And you profess—ah, if this is love, I had rather you hated me! I know nothing of a love that is neither brave nor compassionate, that strikes at the aged and defenceless and that is without—honour!"
He had not taken his eyes from her face, and now there grew in them a strange, haggard fire. Relentless and unscrupulous as was that love of his, Harry could have pitied him at that moment. "Honour?" he said. "It is an empty word to me! What is honour, what is anything, to me without you—Echo, Echo!"
"If you love me so—and now, indeed, I will believe it—give me the letters!" She took a step toward him, her hands clasped together. "Be as chivalrous as you are strong! Do not do this ignoble thing to break my life! I may be your friend, if not—that other. Surely you cannot want to take me at such a price! Do this and all my life long I will be grateful! Oh, I would ask you on my knees! Give me the letters!"
He looked at her where she stood breathlessly, with arms extended, her face bent and pleading, and the sight opened wide within him an abyss that thronged thick with evil passions. The gentler purpose that for a heart-beat had fluttered white wings above the chasm dropped plummet-like into the depths. Give her up? Now, when she came to him with her offer? Resign her—to that tippling dilettante, that flamboyant fop and fool who had drowned his success in a bottle? Not he! A savage elation sprang up in him.
"When you are my wife!" he said.
She straightened, withdrawing her arms with a little gesture of despair and relinquishment. "Where are the letters?"
He pointed to the safe. "They are there."
"When will you give them to me?"