"Oona," he cried, waking to the desperation of the position, "will you give me up, after all we have said?"
She shook her head sadly.
"I will never now deny you what help I can give you, Lord Erradeen."
He turned from her with a cry of bitterness.
"Help without love is no help. Alms and pity will do nothing for me. It must be two—who are one."
She answered him with a faint laugh which was more bitter still; but restrained the jest of pain which rose to her lips, something about three who could not be one. It was the impulse of keen anguish, but it would not have become a discussion that was as serious as life and death.
"It is all a confusion," she said; "what to say or do I know not. It is such a thing—as could not have been foreseen. Some would think it made me free, but I do not feel that I can ever be free." She spoke without looking at him, gazing blankly out upon the landscape. "You said it was no smiling matter to you or me—to you and me. Perhaps," she interrupted herself as if a new light had come upon her, "that is the true meaning of what you say—two that are one; but it is not the usual creed. Two for misery——"
"Oh not for misery, Oona! there is no misery for me where you are."
"Or—any other," she said with a smile of unimaginable suffering, and ridicule, and indignation.
He answered nothing. What could he say to defend himself? "If you could see into my heart," he said after a time, "you would understand. One who is in despair will clutch at anything. Can you imagine a man trying like a coward to escape the conflict, rather than facing it, and bringing the woman he loved into it?"