"I cannot release you, Vane. I love you. Surely you can give me some little tenderness and love when once I am your wife? I will make you happy—I swear it."
"The only woman who could make me happy rests in her ocean grave," Vane answers, with deep solemnity and truth.
Miss Langton regards him in wonder.
"Yet once you scorned her," she says slowly. "How did she win you at last, Vane?"
He is silent a moment, as if the question has struck home to his own heart, awakening thought and memory to life. His lips grow strangely tender in their saddened curve.
"How can I tell?" he says slowly. "Perhaps it was the softened sweetness that hung about her after that night when our lives became one. Perhaps it was her proud, sweet patience under my unkindness. Perhaps, yes, after all! I believe it was the charm of her love that won me. Can you realize such a thing as this, Maud, that love should win love?"
"Yes," she answers, hopefully. "Did I not tell you just now that my love would win you and make you happy?"
He shakes his head impatiently
"That could never be, Maud. You and I are better apart. I can never forget Reine, my slighted girl-bride. She is ever in my thoughts. I think of her as of one living, not dead. I recall her rose-leaf lips, her dark, laughing eyes, the nameless charm that clung about her, and my very heart aches with the intensity of its yearning to find my loved and lost one again."
"Thank God!" exclaimed a low, rapturous, thrilling voice almost at his very side.