Rising, for her eyes seemed to draw him to his feet, he cried in the indescribable tone of suppressed feeling: 

“Shadows are falling upon me.  My interview with these gentlemen may end in a way I cannot now foresee.  In my uncertainty as to how and when we may meet again, I should like to make you such amends as opportunity allows me.  Ermentrude, will you marry me—­now—­to-night, before leaving this house?”

A low cry escaped her.  She was no more prepared for this astounding offer than were these others.  “Carleton!” came in a groan from her lips.  “Carleton!  Carleton!” the word rising in intensity as thought followed thought and her spirits ran the full gamut of what this proposal on his part meant in past, present and future.  Then she fell silent and they saw the great soul of the woman illumine a countenance always noble, with the light of a purpose altogether lofty.  When she spoke it was to say: 

“I recognize your kindness and the impulse which led to this offer.  But I do not wish to add so much as a feather’s weight to your difficulties.  Let matters remain as they are till after——­”

He took a quick step toward her.

“Not if my heart is full of regret?” he cried.  “Not if I recognize in you now the one influence left in this world which can help me bear the burden of my own past and the threatening collapse of my whole future?”

“No,” she replied, with an access of emotion of so elevated a type it added to rather than detracted from her dignity.  “It is too much or it is not enough.”

His head drooped and he fell back, throwing a glance to right and left at the two officials who had drawn up on either side of him.  It was an expressive glance; it was as if he said, “You see! she knows as well as you for whom the arrow was intended—­yet she is kind.”

But in an instant later he was before her again, with an aspect so changed that they all marveled.

“I had hoped,” he began, then stopped.  Passion had supplanted duty in his disturbed mind; a passion so great it swept everything before it and he stood bare to the soul before the woman he had wronged and under the eyes of these men who knew it.  “Life is over for us two,” said he, “whether your presence here is a trap in which I have been caught and from which it is hopeless for me to extricate myself; or whether it is by chance or an act of Providence that we should meet again with eager ears listening and eager eyes watching for such tokens of guilt as will make their own course clear, true it is that they have got what they sought; and whatever the result, nothing of real comfort or honor is left for either you or me.  Our lives have gone down in shipwreck; but before we yield utterly to our fate, will you not grant me my prayer if I precede it by an appeal for forgiveness not only for old wrongs but for my latest and gravest one?  Ermentrude, I entreat.”

Ah, then, they were witness to the fascination of the man, hidden heretofore, but now visible even to the schooled spectators of this tragedy of human souls.  The tone permeated with pathos and charm, the look, the attitude from which all formality had fled and only the natural grace remained, all were of the sort which sways without virtue and rouses in both weak and strong an answering chord of sympathy.