"And you… you say you love me?" he quavered.
"And I love you, too. I love both of you. I am a good woman, at least I always used to think so. I still think so, though my reason tells me that I cannot love two men at the same time and be a good woman. I don't care about that. If I am bad, it is I, and I cannot help myself for being what I was born to be."
She paused and waited, but her lover was still speechless.
"And who's the Anglo-Saxon now?" she queried, with a slight smile, half of bravery, half of amusement at the dumbness of consternation her words had produced in him. "I have told you, without baffling, without fluttering, my full heart and my full intention."
"But you can't!" he protested wildly. "You can't love me and marry Henry."
"Perhaps you have not understood," she chided gravely. "I intend to marry Henry. I love you. I love Henry. But I cannot marry both of you. The law will not permit. Therefore I shall marry only one of you. It is my intention that that one be Henry."
"Then why, why," he demanded, "did you persuade me into remaining?"
"Because I loved you. I have already so told you."
"If you keep this up I shall go mad!" he cried.
"I have felt like going mad over it myself many times," she assured him. "If you think it is easy for me thus to play the Anglo-Saxon, you are mistaken. But no Anglo— Saxon, not even you whom I love so dearly, can hold me in contempt because I hide the shameful secrets of the impulses of my being. Less shameful I find it, for me to tell them, right out in meeting, to you. If this be Anglo-Saxon, make the most of it. If it be Spanish, and woman, and Solano, still make the most of it, for I am Spanish, and woman a Spanish woman of the Solanos-"