Through the proud calmness of his voice penetrates a tone of bitter, unwilling tenderness. Hearing it, her whole soul is melted into fresh, quick tears.
"It is not my ideal, or any one else's, that I love in you!" she cries, stretching out eager white arms towards him; "it is yourself—your very self! Oh, if I could but tear out my heart, and show it you! Oh! why won't you believe me?"
He looks at her—looks at the innocently-wooing arms, at the tear-stained, dimpled, tremulous face—and feels his resolution wasting away like wax before the fire, as Samson's wasted away in Delilah's lap. He turns his eyes away across the cool silvered flood, and hardens his heart against her.
"Why cannot you?" she repeats, in her sweet, vibrating voice.
"Because I have not the faith that removes mountains," he answers, harshly; "because a thing must be probable, or at least possible, before I can give credit to it; because I am unable to understand how, for a man whom you confess to having thought ill-looking, ill-tempered, and ill-mannered, you could, out of pure disinterested love, throw over one to whom you must, at least, have pretended to be sincerely attached."
"I never pretended anything of the kind," she answers, vehemently. "If you don't believe me, ask him. I was engaged to him because he seemed unhappy, and because I did not see any particular reason why I should not, and because he asked me."
Through all his bitter, surging wrath, St. John can hardly forbear a smile. "And you became engaged to me because I asked you?" he says, drily. "At that rate, there is no reason why the number of your aspirants should not be increased ad infinitum.
"And were you going to play the play out to the end, may I ask, and marry us both?" he inquires, in the same cutting key.
No woman can stand being sneered at; she much prefers having the tables and chairs flung at her head.
"Do you think it manly or witty to jeer at me," cries Essie, stung almost to madness by his taunts, "because I have been fool enough to desert for you a man worth a hundred of you?"