“Your wife!” cried Leam with an involuntary gesture of repulsion.  “You are dreaming.”

“No, no:  I am in full earnest.  Tell me that you love me, Leam.  Oh, I believe that you do.  Surely I have not deceived myself so far.  Why should you have come every day—­every day, as you have done—­if you do not love me?  Yes, you do—­I know you, do.  Say so, Leam, my darling, my beloved, and put me out of my misery of suspense.”

“You are my good friend:  I love you like a friend; but a wife—­that is different,” faltered Leam.

“Yes, but it will come if you try,” pleaded Alick, shifting his point from confidence to entreaty.  “Won’t you try to love me as I love you, Leam?  Won’t you try to love me as a wife loves her husband?”

She turned away.  “I cannot,” she answered in a low voice, yet firm and distinct.  It was a voice in which even the most sanguine must have recognized the accent of hopeless certainty, inevitable despair.

“Leam, it will be your salvation,” cried Alick, taking her hands.  He meant her spiritual salvation, not her personal safety:  it was a prayer, not a threat.

“You would not force me by anything you may know?” asked Leam in the same low, firm, distinct voice.  “Not even for safety, Alick.”

“Which I would buy with my own,” he answered—­“with my eternal salvation.”

“I am not worthy of such love,” said Leam trembling.  “And oh, dear Alick, do not blame me, but I cannot return it,” she added piteously.

She saw him start and heard him moan when she said this, but for a moment he was silent.  He seemed half stunned as if by a heavy blow, but one that he was doing his best to bear.  “Tell me so again, Leam.  Let me be convinced,” he then said with pathetic calmness, looking into her face.  “You cannot love me?—­never? never?”

“Never,” she said, her voice breaking.

Alick covered his face in his hands, and she saw the tears trickle slowly through his fingers.  He made no com-plaint, no protestation, only covered up his face and prayed, weeping, recognizing his fate.

She was sorry and heart-struck.  She felt cruel, selfish, ungrateful, but for all that she could not yield nor say that she would marry him, trying to love him.  Confused images of something dearer than this as the love of her life passed before her mind.  They were images without recognizable form or tangible substance, but they were the true love, and this was not like them.  No, she could not yield.  Sorry as she might be for him, and was, she could not promise to marry him.

“Yes,” he then said after a pause, lifting up his wan face, tear-stained and disordered, but making a sad attempt to smile—­“yes, dear Leam, I was, as you say, dreaming.  We shall always be friends, though—­brother and sister, as we have been—­to the end of our lives, shall we not?”

“Yes,” was her answer, tears in her own eyes and a kind of wonder at her hardness running through her repugnance.