Palmerston sprang forward and caught her upraised arm with both hands.
"I—I—love you!" he said eagerly, tightening his grasp, and then loosening it, and falling back with the startled air of one who hears a voice when he thinks himself alone.
The young woman let her arm fall at her side, and stood still an instant, looking at him with untranslatable eyes.
"You love me?" she repeated with slow questioning. "How can you?"
Palmerston smiled rather miserably. "Far more easily than I can explain why I have told you," he answered.
"If it is true, why should you not tell me?" she asked, still looking at him steadily.
Evasion seemed a drapery of lies before her gaze. Palmerston spoke the naked truth:
"Because I cannot ask you to love me in return—because I have promised to marry another woman, and I must keep my promise."
He made the last avowal with the bitter triumph of one who chooses death where he might easily have chosen dishonor.
His listener turned away a little, and looked through the green haze of the cañon at the snow of San Antonio.