“Claude,” I rejoined, gravely, “if I can assist you in any useful or honorable way, I shall be glad to do so, on general principles alone.  You did not respond fairly to my friendly manifestations in times past, after—­after a certain explanation, and the impulse has died away since then, I confess.  Our future lives can have very little in common, I imagine.”

“Would you not help me to break a loathed chain?” he asked, almost fiercely.  “Bonds are often forced upon a man,” he continued, “by the very reason of his superior strength.  It is so hard to resist a pleading woman!  O Miriam! more than any one living, I respect—­revere—­love—­yes, love you.  Pity me!  You can assign no secondary reasons now to professions like these.  You are no longer rich—­no longer—­”

“Miss Kilmansegg, with the golden leg,” I interrupted, derisively.  “Truly you surprise me.”

“O Miriam! how can you treat me with such heartless levity?” and he wrung his hands bitterly.  “I am pushed to desperation already.  I never knew, until I lost you, what you were to me; how superior to all other women, how pure, how unworldly, how strong, how rich in all mental and womanly endowments!  Hear me, Miriam,” and he attempted to take my hand, an error of which he was soon made conscious.

“Claude Bainrothe,” I said, sternly, “I can tolerate you on one condition alone—­that you respect me.  You cease to do this, you, the betrothed husband of another woman! the moment you sully my ear with your addresses, your effusions of sentiment.  They are no more, I know; but even these I will not endure from you, nor yet from—­” I hesitated; a hated name had risen to my lips, but I repressed it.  He, the son, surely was not the father’s keeper.

“You do me injustice; before Heaven, you do!” he exclaimed, flinging back his long curling locks impetuously, by a toss of his superb head, and bending his blazing eyes upon me.  “Hear me, Miriam, I hold the clew to a secret by means of which I can compel wealth to flow back to your feet, in the old channels, if you will be mine.  You would not have thought this condition hard a year ago.  What has occurred to change you?  You loved me then—­by Heaven you love me still!  Oh, say so, Miriam, and make me doubly blessed!  Am I deceived in the expression of that beaming eye?  You will pardon, bless me;” and he knelt humbly at my feet, and clasped my hand.

“Rise, Claude,” I said, “and forgive me if a momentary feeling of triumph, that may have lit my eye, was mingled with the feeling of entire emancipation from all past weakness, which this hour so surely proves, and so satisfactorily, to my own spirit.  You are to me like any other stranger.”

He was standing sullenly before me now, his head dropping on his breast, his hands loosely clasped before him.