"What for me?" she repeated, in the silence which followed.
"For you," said I, "the gladness to have saved an innocent life."
"Tush!" she cried, with a gesture of extravagant contempt. "You mistake; I am no good-deeds monger, to give my bread and butter to the next beggar-lass. I tell you I am the woman who came first out of the womb of Mother-earth. I will yield only that which is snatched from me. What is mine is more mine than another's, because I would suffer, dare, sin, defy a world of men and women in order to keep it, to possess it, to have it all alone to myself!"
"But," I answered, "who am I, that so great a lady should love me? What am I to you, Princess, more than another?"
"That I know not!" she answered, swiftly. "Only God knows that. Perhaps my curse, my punishment. My husband is a far better, truer, nobler man than you, Hugo. I know it; but what of that, when I love him not? Love goes not by the rungs in a ladder, stands not with the most noble on the highest step, is not bestowed, like the rewards in a child's school, to the most deserving. I love you, Hugo Gottfried, it is true. But I wish a thousand times that I did not. Nevertheless—I do! Therefore make your reckoning with that, and put aside puling shams and whimpering subterfuges."
This set me all on edge, and I asked a question.
"What, then, do you propose? Where, shall this comedy end?"
"End!" she said—"end! Aye, of course, men must ever look to an end. Women are content with a continuance. That you should love me and keep on loving me, that is all I want!"
"But," I began, "I love—"
"Ah, do not say it!" she cried, pitifully, clasping her hands with a certain swift appeal in her voice—"do not say it! For God's sake, for the sake of innocent blood, do not say that you love me not!"