She gazed at him, with eyes from which all life had fled.
"I am another's," she said slowly. "I have sinned in loving you, in giving to you my soul. And even as you stood there and held me in your arms, it flashed upon me, like lightning in a dark stormy night—I saw the abyss, at the brink of which we stand, both, you and I."—
"But we have done no wrong—we have not sinned," he protested wildly.
She silenced him with a gesture of her beautiful hands.
"Who may command the waters of the cataract, go here,—or go there? Who may tell them to return to their lawful bed? I have neither power nor strength, to resist your pleading. You have been life and love to me, all,—all,—and all this you are to-day. And therefore must we part,—part, ere it be too late—" she concluded with a wild cry of anguish, "ere we are both engulfed in the darkness."—
And he fell at her feet as if stunned by a thunderbolt.
"Do not send me away—" he pleaded, his voice choked with anguish. "Do not send me from you."
"You will go," she said softly, deaf to his prayers. "It is the supreme test of your love, great as I know it is."
"But I cannot leave you, I cannot go, never to see you more—" and he grasped the cool white hands of the woman as a drowning man will grasp a straw.
She did not attempt, for the time, to take them from him. She looked down upon him wistfully.