“Why, certainly I did not! How could you think I did? Something possessed my will. But, thank heaven, I am myself again. Why, sir, how could I? You know very little of me, sir, to think—Oh!” She covered her face with her hands. “What things must I have said and done, in my clouded state, to make you think that! You,—an enemy, a rebel, a person whose only possible interest to me arises from his enmity!”
Dazzled as he was by her newly discovered beauty, the imposition on him was complete. He saw this covetable being now indifferent to him, out of his power to possess, likely soon to pass into the possession of another.
“Pray try to forget awhile that enmity,” he supplicated.
“I shall try, and then you can have no interest for me at all.”
“Then don’t try, I beg. I’d rather have an interest for you as an enemy than not at all.”
“Why, really, sir—” She seemed half puzzled, half amused.
“Lord,” quoth he, “how I have been deluded! I thought my love-making that night, feigned though it was, had wakened a response.”
“Love-making, do you say? Will you believe me, sir, I don’t remember what passed here that night, save the unaccountable ending,—my making you my guest instead of their prisoner.”
“I wish you were pretending all this!”