"About the most intimate you have, I should say: yourself, in fact!"
"Is that news?" she asks, trying to smile. "I am going to be married, am not I, to you?"
"I am not aware that my name is—Brandon," he answers, coldly, while his sorrowful, fierce eyes go through her heart like poisoned arrows.
She turns her head aside and groans. A great vague darkness blots out the broad moon, and the stars' thick cohorts; the bright water beside her grows black as hell's sluggish rivers.
He had not known how much he had been buoyed up by hope till that mute gesture of hers bid him despair.
"It's true, then?" he asks in a voice of sharp rage and anguish, catching hold of the white wonder of her arm, on which his fingers, unwittingly cruel, leave crimson prints.
"Is what true?" she asks, faintly, trying for yet a little longer to stave off Fate, to push away Nemesis, with her weak woman-fingers.
"That you are—God! am I choking?—engaged to Brandon?"
"I was once," she falters under her breath.
"How long ago?"