“I respect him!” said she, cool now, and controlling the situation. I felt that I had lost my one moment of advantage—the moment when I should have taken her into my arms. Not timidity, but reverence, had balked me. My heart turned, as it were, in my breast, with a hot, dumb fury—at myself.
“The respect that cannot breed love for a lover will soon breed contempt,” said I, holding myself hard to mere reasoning.
She ignored this idle answer. She arose and came close up to me.
“Paul,” she said, scarcely above a whisper, “will you save yourself for my sake? If I say—if I say that I do love you a little—that if it could have been different—been you—I should have been—oh, glad, glad!—then will you go, for my sake?”
“No, no indeed!” shouted the heart within me at this confession. But with hope came cunning. I temporized.
“And if I go, for your sake,” I asked, “when do you propose to become the wife of the Englishman?”
“Not for a long time, I will promise you,” said she earnestly. “Not for a year—no, not for two years, if you like. Oh,”—with a catch in her voice,—“not till I can feel differently about you, Paul!” And she hung her head at the admission.
“Dear,” I said, “most dear and wonderful, can you not even now see how monstrous it would be if I should seem, for a moment, to relinquish you to another? Soul and body must tell you you are mine, as I am yours. But your eyes are shut. You are a maid, and you do not realize what it is that I would save you from. It is your very whiteness blinds you, so that you do not see the intolerableness of what they would thrust upon you. For you it would be a sin. You do not see it—but you would see it, awaking to the truth when it was too late. From the horror of that awakening I must save you. I must”—
But she did not see; though her brain must have comprehended, her body did not; and therefore there could be no real comprehension of a matter so vital. She brushed aside my passionate argument, and came close up to me.
“Paul, dear,” she said, “I think I know the beauty of sacrifice. I am sure I know what is right. You cannot shake me. I know what must be in the end. But if you will go and save yourself, I promise that the end shall be far off—so that he may grow angry, and perhaps even set me free, as I have almost asked him to do. But now this is good-by, dear. You shall go. You will not disobey me. But you may say good-by to me. And as once you kissed my feet (they have been proud ever since), so—though it is a sin, I know—you may kiss my lips, just once,—and go.”