She shrank a little as at a blow.
“One cannot love and unlove at will,” she said simply. “It is very generous of you to be ready to give the shield of your umblemished honor to a dishonored woman. But were I ungenerous, unworthy enough, to accept such a sacrifice I should but make you and make myself more unhappy than we now are. All the feeling which is still alive in me lives only for the memory of the past.”
Her cousin turned away and paced the room to hide the pain he felt. He had loved her through good and evil report, had remained unmarried for her sake, and was ready now to accept all obloquy, censure and discredit for her sake.
“Go, my dear Ernst,” she said very gently; “go, and forget me. You might as well love a buried corpse as love a woman with such a fate as mine.”
“My love should have power to magnetize the corpse into fresh life!”
She shook her head.
“It would be impossible. Were it possible, what use would be a galvanized corpse? An unnatural unreal thing which would drop back into the dust of death.”
He did not reply; he endeavored to control his emotion.
“My dear Olga,” he said, when he could do so, “allow me to say one thing to you without causing you offence. Unknown to yourself, I think you cherish an illusion which can only cause you unhappiness. You think and speak as if your division from Adrian Vanderlin were but some quarrel, some mistake, which explanation, mediation, or time could clear away. You forget that you are entire strangers to each other; worse than strangers, because there is an irrevocable chasm between you.”
She did not reply; an expression of intense suffering came into her eyes, but she restrained any outward utterance of it.