“Ah, spare me!” she cried, through her tears. “Spare me! I cannot bear to hear your words. Would that I might return your love, but I dare not. No, I dare not—for your sake, as well as for mine.”
Was she thinking of her dead lover, and of the traitorous part she had been compelled to play? Yes. She hated herself, and at the same time held me in fear.
“But you love me, Dorothy?” I whispered. “Tell me, truthfully and honestly.”
“No, no,” she urged. “Do not seek to wring the truth from me. Let us part. We must never meet again after to-night. I—I saved you once from death, that night when I took you to Blackheath,” she went on breathlessly. “It suddenly dawned upon me that they meant to kill you and secure all the documents which you had found on board the derelict. They awaited you in a house they had taken for the purpose, and compelled me to come to you with a fictitious story regarding my brother, and to induce you to walk into the trap. Held in bondage, I dared not disobey, and came to you. But at the last moment I compelled you to return and went back to face their anger. Why did I act as I did? Cannot you guess?”
“Perhaps, Dorothy, it was because you entertained a spark of affection for me?”
A silence fell between us for some moments. Then she answered in a low voice, only just audible: —
“You have guessed aright. It was.”
I leant towards her and kissed her cold, hard-set lips. She made no remonstrance, only she shuddered in my grasp, and a second later returned my caress and then burst again into tears.
“Ah, you must not care for me,” she declared. “I am unworthy. You don’t know everything, or you would hate me rather than love me.”
“But I love you with the whole strength of my being, Dorothy!” I declared, in deep earnestness. “That is enough. Now that you reciprocate my affection I am satisfied. I want for no more. You are mine, darling, and I am yours—for ever.”