She dropped on her knees, and taking my hand put it silently to her lips. I tried to raise her. It was useless: she steadily resisted me.
“Does this mean No?” I asked.
“It means,” she said in faint, broken tones, “that I prize your honor beyond my happiness. If I marry you, your career is destroyed by your wife; and the day will come when you will tell me so. I can suffer—I can die; but I can not face such a prospect as that. Forgive me and forget me. I can say no more!”
She let go of my hand, and sank on the floor. The utter despair of that action told me, far more eloquently than the words which she had just spoken, that her resolution was immovable. She had deliberately separated herself from me; her own act had parted us forever.
CHAPTER XXXVII. THE TWO DESTINIES.
I MADE no movement to leave the room; I let no sign of sorrow escape me. At last, my heart was hardened against the woman who had so obstinately rejected me. I stood looking down at her with a merciless anger, the bare remembrance of which fills me at this day with a horror of myself. There is but one excuse for me. The shock of that last overthrow of the one hope that held me to life was more than my reason could endure. On that dreadful night (whatever I may have been at other times), I myself believe it, I was a maddened man.
I was the first to break the silence.
“Get up,” I said coldly.
She lifted her face from the floor, and looked at me as if she doubted whether she had heard aright.