"Let me go, I tell you! You shall! You must! Can't you see that you are hateful and odious to me—that you are a black man and I am a white woman?"
At the next moment she felt Ishmael's arms relax, and she found herself on her feet. A sense of immense, immeasurable relief came over her. A sense of triumph, too, for what she had said she would do she had done.
When she recovered herself sufficiently to look at Ishmael again, he was standing apart from her and his head was down. He could no longer deceive himself. A whirlwind of chaotic darkness had swept over him. The storm of his passion was gone.
Helena saw that he was deeply wounded, and, notwithstanding the aversion he had inspired in her a moment before, she pitied him from the bottom of her heart.
"I am sorry for what I said just now," she murmured in a low tone. "It was hateful of me, and I ask your pardon."
She was still panting, and she had to pause for breath, but he did not reply, and after a moment she began to excuse herself, saying falteringly—
"But you must see that ... that there could never have been anything between you and me, because ... because——"
Raising his eyes, he looked not into her face but at the veil that was fixed to her hair, and she found it difficult to go on.
"Did you not say yourself," she said, "that marriage was not joining hands under a handkerchief, or repeating words after a Cadi, but a sacrament of love, mutual love, and that everything else was sin? Therefore——"
"Well?"