"Let your own lips tell me you love me, Elise."
She looked up at him from under drooping lashes. Her mental decision came before her actual complaisance. She revelled for a time in the ecstasy of her mental abandon to love, and trembled in the very joy of it.
"Yes, yes, I love you,"—and with closing eyes she lifted her face in surrender. A long, long caress intoxicates them, and then, as if in expiation for the blessed delirium of it—
"But not while Helen—not until Helen—oh, it is too horrible to wait for your own sister to die!"—and she is crying her heart out against his shoulder.
Rutledge waited till her tears were spent, and then tenderly he protested.
"But Elise, you will not make any such decree as that. There's no need that we should wait on Helen's account."
"Not while she lives, not while she lives," Elise repeated, looking into his eyes. "I cannot permit your love to bring you to—"
"My love is all-sufficient, Elise; and all else is nothing since you love me. Do not let your pride defeat us of our happiness, sweetheart. Already it—"
"Pride? I have no pride any more for you, my dear. I do not conceal my heart's love nor its woes from you. I believe that love alone, not noblesse, brings you to me now. I love you, yes, I love you, but my love forbids that I should marry you and destroy your career and your mother's happiness."
"My mother! What do you know of that?"