"Would you?" she said, with some surprise. "No, Cornelius, you could not, and even if you could, I would not prolong this. I might deny or give some explanation at which you would grasp eagerly; but where is the use?—I am weary." She passed her hand across her brow, as if to put by someheavy sense of fatigue, and looked round at us with an expression of dreary languor in her gaze which I have never forgotten. "I am weary," she said again; "for days and weeks this sense of fatigue has been creeping over me. The struggle to win that I never should have prized when won, is ended. I regret it not—still less should you."
"Miriam," passionately said Cornelius, "it is false, and you must, you shall deny it."
"I will not," Miriam replied firmly, and not without a certain cool dignity which she preserved to the last. "I tell you I am weary, and that if this did not part us, something else should."
A chair stood near Cornelius; he sat down, and gave Miriam a long, searching glance, that seemed to ask, in its dismay and indignant grief— "Are you the woman whom I have loved?"
"You never understood me," she said, impatiently. "You might have guessed that I had, from youth upwards, lived in the fever of passion inspired or felt; you might have known that I should master or be mastered. I warned you that though I could promise nothing, I should exact much, and you defied me to exact too much. Yet when it came to the test—what did you give me? a feeling weak as water, cold as ice! Why, you would not so much as have given up what you call Art for my sake!"
"Nor for that of mortal woman," indignantly replied Cornelius. "Give up painting! Do you forget I told you I would love you as a man should love?"
"That is, I suppose, a little more than Daisy, and something less than your pictures. I have been accustomed to other love."
Cornelius reddened.
"An unworthy passion," he said, "stops at nothing to secure its gratification; a noble one is bound by honour."
"I leave you to such passions," calmly answered Miriam; "to painting, which you love so much; to the domestic affections in which you weakly thought to include me. I have tried to make you feel what I call passion, I have failed; it is well that we should part; let us do so quietly, and without recrimination."