she likewise should not become the wife of a gentleman.  By degrees, after tentative beginnings, he put his spell upon her ears, for she was attentive, and walked with a demure forward look upon the pavement; in reality taking small note of what things he said, until he quoted, as against himself, sentences from Dahlia’s letters; and then she fixed her eyes on him, astonished that he should thus heap condemnation on his own head.  They were most pathetic scraps quoted by him, showing the wrestle of love with a petrifying conviction of its hopelessness, and with the stealing on of a malady of the blood.  They gave such a picture of Dahlia’s reverent love for this man, her long torture, her chastity of soul and simple innocence, and her gathering delirium of anguish, as Rhoda had never taken at all distinctly to her mind.  She tried to look out on him from a mist of tears.

“How could you bear to read the letters?” she sobbed.

“Could any human being read them and not break his heart for her?” said he.

“How could you bear to read them and leave her to perish!”

His voice deepened to an impressive hollow:  “I read them for the first time yesterday morning, in France, and I am here!”

It was undeniably, in its effect on Rhoda, a fine piece of pleading artifice.  It partially excused or accounted for his behaviour, while it filled her with emotions which she felt to be his likewise, and therefore she could not remain as an unsympathetic stranger by his side.

With this, he flung all artifice away.  He told her the whole story, saving the one black episode of it—­the one incomprehensible act of a desperate baseness that, blindly to get free, he had deliberately permitted, blinked at, and had so been guilty of.  He made a mental pause as he was speaking, to consider in amazement how and by what agency he had been reduced to shame his manhood, and he left it a marvel.  Otherwise, he in no degree exonerated himself.  He dwelt sharply on his vice of ambition, and scorned it as a misleading light.  “Yet I have done little since I have been without her!” And then, with a persuasive sincerity, he assured her that he could neither study nor live apart from Dahlia.  “She is the dearest soul to me on earth; she is the purest woman.  I have lived with her, I have lived apart from her, and I cannot live without her.  I love her with a husband’s love.  Now, do you suppose I will consent to be separated from her?  I know that while her heart beats, it’s mine.  Try to keep her from me—­you kill her.”

“She did not die,” said Rhoda.  It confounded his menaces.

“This time she might,” he could not refrain from murmuring.

“Ah!” Rhoda drew off from him.

“But I say,” cried he, “that I will see her.”

“We say, that she shall do what is for her good.”

“You have a project?  Let me hear it.  You are mad, if you have.”