"To-night I leave New Orleans with my servant Mima. I have my reasons for this step. N'importe; they concern not you. I have made up my mind to be your wife, to bear your name, to go home with you to Boston. If you say the word, a priest shall be brought within the hour to make us one. Then we can escape together to-night and fly this fatal city which now holds imminent danger for you. Do you consent?"
He looked with his cold, disconcerting gaze full into her eyes.
"What if I refuse?" he queried.
"You are a Yankee all over—you answer one question with another," she said, with a faint, mirthless laugh. "But my alternative is so bitter I shrink from naming it. Tell me, are you going to make me your loving wife?"
"I would die first!" he responded, with passionate emphasis.
She looked up at him, pale with wrath and mortification, and hissed, angrily:
"You have chosen well, for it will come to that—to—to death!"
"You would murder me?" he exclaimed, with a start; and she answered, defiantly:
"If you can not be mine, no one else shall ever have your love or your name. If you persist in refusing my generous offer, I shall go away from here with Mima to-night; but I shall leave you in this cellar to starve and to die, and to molder into dust until the story of your mysterious disappearance that night has been forgotten of men."
"You could not be so inhuman!" he uttered, with paling lips.