"I will! I will! Oh, Isabel, forgive and help me," he pleaded, in a voice thrilling with despair.
"I help you?" she repeated, in an inquiring tone, in which there was a note of surprise.
"Yes, with your sweet counsel, your pure example and influence."
"I do not understand you, quite," she responded, her lovely color waning as a suspicion of his meaning began to dawn upon her.
He raised his face, which was drawn and haggard from the remorse he was suffering, and looked appealingly into hers. But, as he met the gaze of her pure, grave eyes, a flush of shame mounted to his brow as he realized how despicable he must appear to her in now suing so humbly for what he had once trampled under foot as worthless.
Yet an unspeakable yearning to regain her love had taken possession of him, and every other emotion was, for the moment, surmounted by that.
"I mean, come back to me! try to love me again! and let me, under the influence of your sweet presence, your precepts and noble example, strive to become the man you have described, and that, at last, my own heart yearns to be."
His plea was like the cry of a despairing soul, who realized, all too late, the fatal depths of the pit into which he had voluntarily plunged.
Isabel Stewart saw this, and pitied him, as she would have pitied any other human being who had become so lost to all honor and virtue; but his suggestion, his appeal that she would go back to him, live with him, associate with him from day to day, was so repulsive to her that she could not quite repress her aversion, and a slight shiver ran over her frame, so chilling that all her color faded, even from her lips; and Gerald Goddard, seeing it, realized the hopelessness of his desire even before she could command herself sufficiently to answer him.
"That would not be possible, Gerald," she finally replied. "Truth compels me to tell you plainly that whatever affection I may once have entertained for you has become an emotion of the past; it was killed outright when I believed myself a deserted outcast in Rome. I should do sinful violence to my own heart and nature if I should heed your request, and also become but a galling reproach to you, rather than a help."