"Zara," I said, choosing my words deliberately, "last night in the glass covered garden, where the colored lights were glowing, I heard you utter words which I can never forget, and which I have thought upon many times since I heard them. You repudiated, with all the intensity of your soul, the methods which these nihilists employ to attain their ends. You called them murderers, assassins, scoundrels, cutthroats, defamers of character, and many other things which I need not name. What you did not accuse them of, in words, you charged them with, by implication; and now you ask me to become one with them; and not only that, to deny my manhood and my honor by repudiating my oath to another."
"I asked you to protect yourself and me," she said, simply, but with a coldness and a suggestion of hardness in her tone, that had been entirely absent from it until that instant.
"I will do that, Zara. I will save you, and I will save myself. I will save you from yourself. There will be a way. I have not yet determined upon what it will be, but I will find a means."
Suddenly she slipped to the floor, upon her knees before me, and with clasped hands upraised, in an attitude of supplication, she cried aloud in a very agony of intensity.
"Oh, my love, do as I ask you to do. Take the oath of nihilism."
CHAPTER XIV
THE SCORN OF A WOMAN
It seemed at that moment as if I could not deny her. Every impulse of my soul cried out to me that it would be a very little thing to do, after all.
It was not the danger which threatened, that influenced me, not at all that; it was her own supplication. The danger, and our own necessities, were very real for her, even if I, in my secret heart, made little of them.