“’All the world ‘s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’” she said, quoting the familiar words as if in a dream.  “We are such puppets in the great play!  How strange it all is!  How dangerously close real life is, always skirting the precipice of tragedy!  Plans fail, lines tangle, and lives are changed forever by events seemingly insignificant.  To-morrow is always mystery.  I wonder, is it not a dim consciousness of this that renders the stage so attractive to the multitude?  Even its burlesques, its lurid melodramas, are never utterly beyond the possible.  Everywhere are found stranger stories than any romancer can invent; and yet we sometimes term our lives commonplace.”  She leaned back against the wall, a sob coming into her voice.  “What—­what is going to be the end of this—­for me?”

“Whatever you will,” he exclaimed passionately, forgetful of all but her power over him.  “It is you who must choose.”

“Yes, it is I who must choose,” her face still uplifted.  “Because I am not a leaf to float on the air, my destiny decided by a breath of wind, I must choose; yet how can I know I decide rightly?  When heart and conscience stand opposed, any decision means sacrifice and pain.  I meant those hasty words wrung out of me in shame, and spoken yonder; I meant them then, and yet they haunt me like so many sheeted ghosts.  ’Tis not their untruth, but the thought will not down that the real cause of their utterance was not the wrong done me.  It had other birth.”

“In what?”

She did not in the least hesitate to answer, her eyes clear and honest upon his own.

“In my love for you,” she answered, quietly, her cheeks reddening to the frank avowal.

He grasped her hands, drawing her, unresisting, toward him.

“You confess this to me?”

“Yes, to you; but to you only because I trust you, because I know you as an honorable man,” she said, speaking with an earnest simplicity irresistible.  “I am not ashamed of the truth, not afraid to acknowledge it frankly.  If there be wrong in this; that wrong has already been accomplished; the mere uttering of it cannot harm either of us.  We know the fact without words.  I love you; with all my heart I love you.  I can say this to you here in the silence, yet I could not speak it openly before the world.  Why?  Because such love is wrong?  Under God I do not know; only, the world would misunderstand, would question my motives, would misjudge my faith.  By the code I am not the mistress of my heart; it has been legally surrendered.  But you will not misjudge, or question.  If I could not trust, I could not love you; I do both.  Now and here, I put my hands in yours, I place my life, my conscience, in your keeping.  For good or evil, for heaven or hell, I yield to you my faith.  Tell me what I am utterly unable to decide for myself alone:  What is my duty, the duty of a woman situated as I am?”