“Answer me!  Choose for me!” he said vehemently.  “Be my law, and be my God!”

She gave a gesture almost of fear.

“Hush, hush!  The woman does not live who should be that to any man.”

“You shall be it to me!  Choose for me!”

“I cannot!  You leave so much in darkness and untold——­”

“Nothing that you need know to decide your choice for me, save one thing only—­that I love you.”

She shuddered.

“This is madness!  What have you seen of me?”

“Enough to love you while my life shall last, and love no other woman.  Ah!  I was but an African trooper in your sight, but in my own I was your equal.  You only saw a man to whom your gracious alms and your gentle charity were to be given, as a queen may stoop in mercy to a beggar; but I saw one who had the light of my old days in her smile, the sweetness of my old joys in her eyes, the memories of my old world in her every grace and gesture.  You forget!  I was nothing to you; but you were so much to me.  I loved you the first moment that your voice fell on my ear.  It is madness!  Oh, yes!  I should have said so, too, in those old years.  A madness I would have sworn never to feel.  But I have lived a hard life since then, and no men ever love like those who suffer.  Now you know all; know the worst that tempts me.  No famine, no humiliation, no obloquy, no loss I have known, ever drove me so cruelly to buy back my happiness with the price of dishonor as the one desire—­to stand in my rightful place before men, and be free to strive with you for what they have not won!”

As she heard, all the warmth, all the life, faded out of her face; it grew as white as his own, and her lips parted slightly, as though to draw her breath was oppressive.  The wild words overwhelmed her with their surprise not less than they shocked her with their despair.  An intense truth vibrated through them, a truth that pierced her and reached her heart, as no other such supplication ever had done.  She had no love for him yet, or she thought not; she was very proud, and resisted such passions; but in that moment the thought swept by her that such love might be possible.  It was the nearest submission to it she had ever given.  She heard him in unbroken silence; she kept silence long after he had spoken.  So far as her courage and her dignity could be touched with it, she felt something akin to terror at the magnitude of the choice left to her.

“You give me great pain, great surprise,” she murmured.  “All I can trust is that your love is of such sudden birth that it will die as rapidly—­”

He interrupted her.

“You mean that, under no circumstances—­not even were I to possess my inheritance—­could you give me any hope that I might wake your tenderness?”

She looked at him full in the eyes with the old, fearless, haughty instinct of refusal to all such entreaty, which had made her so indifferent—­and many said so pitiless—­to all.  At his gaze, however her own changed and softened, grew shadowed, and then wandered from him.