"No, do not touch me!" she exclaimed, wildly. "At least spare me that indignity. All other relations that have existed between us are altered now, and merged simply into this—I am your prisoner, and you are my jailer. The eagle spurns the hand of its captor. Remember, there is proud, untamable blood in my veins that will not be subdued. I am Harry Vere's daughter."
Bonnibel saw him wince as the name of her beloved father passed her lips.
"Ah, you are not lost to all sense of shame," she cried. "You can tremble at the name of the hero you have wronged through his helpless daughter! Oh, Colonel Carlyle, by the memory of my father, whom you pretended to love and honor, I beg you to let me go free from this place."
Her angry recklessness had broken down suddenly into pathetic pleading. Her slender hands were locked together, her eyes were lifted to his with great, raining tears shining in them. He turned half away, trembling in spite of his iron will at sight of those tearful eyes, and parted, quivering lips.
"Bonnibel," he answered, in a voice of repressed emotion, "my suffering at the course I have found myself compelled to pursue with you is greater than your own. I love you with all the strength of a man's heart, and yet I am almost compelled to believe you the falsest of women. And yet, through all the distrust and suspicion which your recent conduct has forced me to harbor, the instinct that bids me have faith in the honor of Harry Vere's daughter is so much beyond the mere power of my reason that at one little promise from your lips you might this moment go free!"
"And that promise?" she asked, dashing the blinding tears away from her eyes and looking into his face.
"Bonnibel, on the night when I presumed to lock you into your chamber you were about to fly from me—to what fate I know not, but—I feared the worst. Think of the shame, the disgrace, the agony I must have endured from your desertion! Can you wonder that I took stringent measures to prevent you from carrying your wild project into execution? I would have laid you dead at my feet before you should have broken my heart and made me a target for the scorn of the world."
She did not flinch as he uttered the emphatic words and looked keenly into her face. She thought of herself vaguely as of one lying dead at the feet of that stern, old, white-haired man, yet the passing thought came to her indifferently as to one who was bearing the burden of a "life more pathetic than death." She felt no anger rising within her at the threat. Only a faint, stifled yearning awoke within her for a moment as his stern voice evoked a vision of the rest and peace of the grave.
"You see how strongly I feel on this subject, my wife," he continued, after a long pause, "yet even now you shall go free if you will give me your sacred word of honor, by the memory of your father, that you will not desert me—that you will not leave me!"