“Claude, this is mockery; release my hand; arise, this position becomes you not, nor yet me.  Go!  I am lost to you forever! your own cowardice, your own weak worship of expediency, have been your real obstacles.  For your sake I was willing to brave poverty, debt, expatriation.  It was you who preferred the dross of gold, and the indulgence of your own luxury and that of the sybarite, your father, to the passionate affection I bore you.  It is too late now for regret or recrimination.  Go, I command you! accomplish your destiny; continue to beguile Miriam with the tale of your affection, and in return reap your harvest of deluded affection and golden store from her! and from me receive your guerdon of scorn.  For I, Claude Bainrothe, know you as you are, and despise you utterly!” Her voice trembled with anger, I knew of old its violent ring of rage.

“No, Evelyn, you only know me as I seem”—­he spoke mildly, humbly—­“not as I am.  I am not a very bad man, Evelyn, nor even a very weak one; in all respects, vile as I appear to you, only a very unhappy wretch, and as such entitled to your respectful compassion at least—­all I dare ask for now.  I will not receive your scorn as my fit guerdon.  Is there no strength in overcoming inclination as I have done, in compelling words of affection to flow from loathing lips?—­for those scars alone, Evelyn, in contrast to your speckless beauty, would of themselves be enough to shock a fastidious man like me, those hideous livid scars which I have yet to behold, and shudder over, marking one whole side as you assure me of neck, shoulder, and arm, things that in woman are of such inestimable value, of almost more importance than the divine face itself.”

“Yes, but the other side is statuesque enough to satisfy the requisitions of a sensuous sculptor,” she rejoined, coldly; “you are wrong, Claude, let us be just!  Miriam is very well formed, to say no more, and her skin is like a magnolia-leaf, where sun and wind have not touched or tanned it; then those scars will turn white after a while like the rest, and perhaps scarcely be visible.”

“O Heavens! hideous white seams!” he exclaimed, passionately.  “I have seen such, like small-pox marks, only ten times more frightful and indelible.”  In his impotent weakness he moaned aloud.

“Worse and worse!  I will tell you frankly, had I known of them, the engagement never would have been contracted—­no, not though the inferno had opened beneath me as my only alternative—­but honor binds me now.”

“You are fastidious truly, and your sense of honor supreme,” she sneered.

“Beauty there was not,” he continued, without regarding her rejoinder, “in any remarkable degree.  I could have borne its absence with common patience, but absolute disfigurement, deformity, such as you assure me those burns have left behind them, is too dreadful!  Had not Dr. Pemberton bared her arm in bleeding, as he did, I should never have known of it at all probably until too late.  That one mark was suggestive.”