“You evade my question:  I am serious.  Oh!” he walked away from her booming a sound of utter repudiation of her present imbecility, and hurrying to her side, said:  “But it was manifest to the whole world!  It was a legend.  To love like Laetitia Dale, was a current phrase.  You were an example, a light to women:  no one was your match for devotion.  You were a precious cameo, still gazing!  And I was the object.  You loved me.  You loved me, you belonged to me, you were mine, my possession, my jewel; I was prouder of your constancy than of anything else that I had on earth.  It was a part of the order of the universe to me.  A doubt of it would have disturbed my creed.  Why, good heaven! where are we?  Is nothing solid on earth?  You loved me!”

“I was childish, indeed.”

“You loved me passionately!”

“Do you insist on shaming me through and through, Sir Willoughby?  I have been exposed enough.”

“You cannot blot out the past:  it is written, it is recorded.  You loved me devotedly, silence is no escape.  You loved me.”

“I did.”

“You never loved me, you shallow woman!  ‘I did!’ As if there could be a cessation of a love!  What are we to reckon on as ours?  We prize a woman’s love; we guard it jealously, we trust to it, dream of it; there is our wealth; there is our talisman!  And when we open the casket it has flown!—­barren vacuity!—­we are poorer than dogs.  As well think of keeping a costly wine in potter’s clay as love in the heart of a woman!  There are women—­women!  Oh, they are all of a stamp coin!  Coin for any hand!  It’s a fiction, an imposture—­they cannot love.  They are the shadows of men.  Compared with men, they have as much heart in them as the shadow beside the body.  Laetitia!”

“Sir Willoughby.”

“You refuse my offer?”

“I must.”

“You refuse to take me for your husband?”

“I cannot be your wife.”

“You have changed? . . . you have set your heart? . . . you could marry? . . . there is a man? . . . you could marry one!  I will have an answer, I am sick of evasions.  What was in the mind of Heaven when women were created, will be the riddle to the end of the world!  Every good man in turn has made the inquiry.  I have a right to know who robs me—­We may try as we like to solve it.—­Satan is painted laughing!—­I say I have a right to know who robs me.  Answer me.”

“I shall not marry.”

“That is not an answer.”

“I love no one.”

“You loved me.—­You are silent?—­but you confessed it.  Then you confess it was a love that could die!  Are you unable to perceive how that redounds to my discredit?  You loved me, you have ceased to love me.  In other words you charge me with incapacity to sustain a woman’s love.  You accuse me of inspiring a miserable passion that cannot last a lifetime!  You let the world see that I am a man to be aimed at for a temporary mark!  And simply because I happen to