“If I thought it possible you could ever care——­”

She moved slightly from him; her face was very white still, and her voice, though serenely sustained, shook as it answered him.

“If I could—­believe me, I am not a woman who would bid you forsake your honor to spare yourself or me.  Let us speak no more of this.  What can it avail, except to make you suffer greater things?  Follow the counsels of your own conscience.  You have been true to them hitherto; it is not for me, or through me, that you shall ever be turned aside from them.”

A bitter sigh broke from him as he heard.

“They are noble words.  And yet it is so easy to utter, so hard to follow them.  If you had one thought of tenderness for me, you could not speak them.”

A flush passed over her face.

“Do not think me without feeling—­without sympathy—­pity—­”

“These are not love.”

She was silent; they were, in a sense, nearer to love than any emotion she had ever known.

“If you loved me,” he pursued passionately—­“ah, God! the very word from me to you sounds insult; and yet there is not one thought in me that does not honor you—­if you loved me, could you stand there and bid me drag on this life forever; nameless, friendless, hopeless; having all the bitterness, but none of the torpor of death; wearing out the doom of a galley slave, though guiltless of all crime?”

“Why speak so?  You are unreasoning.  A moment ago you implored me not to tempt you to the violation of what you hold your honor; because I bid you be faithful to it, you deem me cruel!”

“Heaven help me!  I scarce know what I say.  I ask you, if you were a woman who loved me, could you decide thus?”

“These are wild questions,” she murmured; “what can they serve?  I believe that I should—­I am sure that I should.  As it is—­as your friend—­”

“Ah, hush!  Friendship is crueler than hate.”

“Cruel?”

“Yes; the worst cruelty when we seek love—­a stone proffered us when we ask for bread in famine!”

There was desperation, almost ferocity, in the answer; she was moved and shaken by it—­not to fear, for fear was not in her nature, but to something of awe, and something of the despairing hopelessness that was in him.

“Lord Royallieu,” she said slowly, as if the familiar name were some tie between them, some cause of excuse for these, the only love words she had ever heard without disdain and rejection—­“Lord Royallieu, it is unworthy of you to take this advantage of an interview which I sought, and sought for your own sake.  You pain me, you wound me.  I cannot tell how to answer you.  You speak strangely, and without warrant.”

He stood mute and motionless before her, his head sunk on his chest.  He knew that she rebuked him justly; he knew that he had broken through every law he had prescribed himself, and that he had sinned against the code of chivalry which should have made her sacred from such words while they were those he could not utter, nor she hear, except in secrecy and shame.  Unless he could stand justified in her sight and in that of all men, he had no right to seek to wring out tenderness from her regret and from her pity.  Yet all his heart went out to her in one irrepressible entreaty.