“You will come to Springfield soon,” she avowed, slipping from before him so as to leave the way to the door open.

“Amabel!” His voice was strangely husky, and the involuntary opening and shutting of his hands revealed the emotion under which he was labouring.  “Do you love me?  You have acknowledged it now and then, but always as if you did not mean it.  Now you acknowledge that you may some day, and this time as if you did mean it.  What is the truth?  Tell me, without coquetry or dissembling, for I am in dead earnest, and—–­” He paused, choked, and turned toward the window where but a few minutes before he had taken that solemn oath.  The remembrance of it seemed to come back with the movement.  Flushing with a new agitation, he wheeled upon her sharply.  “No, no,” he prayed, “say nothing.  If you swore you did not love me I should not believe it, and if you swore that you did I should only find it harder to repeat what must again be said, that a union between us can never take place.  I have given my solemn promise to—–­”

“Well, well.  Why do you stop?  Am I so hard to talk to that the words will not leave your lips?”

“I have promised my father I will never marry you.  He feels that he has grounds of complaint against you, and as I owe him everything—–­”

He stopped amazed.  She was looking at him intently, that same low laugh still on her lips.

“Tell the truth,” she whispered.  “I know to what extent you consider your father’s wishes.  You think you ought not to marry me after what took place last night.  Frederick, I like you for this evidence of consideration on your part, but do not struggle too relentlessly with your conscience.  I can forgive much more in you than you think, and if you really love me—–­”

“Stop!  Let us understand each other.”  He had turned mortally pale, and met her eyes with something akin to alarm.  “What do you allude to in speaking of last night?  I did not know there was anything said by us in our talk together—–­”

“I do not allude to our talk.”

“Or—­or in the one dance we had—–­”

“Frederick, a dance is innocent.”

The word seemed to strike him with the force of a blow.

“Innocent,” he repeated, “innocent?” becoming paler still as the full weight of her meaning broke gradually upon him.

“I followed you into town,” she whispered, coming closer, and breathing the words into his ear.  “But what I saw you do there will not prevent me from obeying you if you say:  ’Follow me wherever I go, Amabel; henceforth our lives are one.’”

“My God!”

It was all he said, but it seemed to create a gulf between them.  In the silence that followed, the evil spirit latent beneath her beauty began to make itself evident even in the smile which no longer called into view the dimples which belong to guileless mirth, while upon his face, after the first paralysing effect of her words had passed, there appeared an expression of manly resistance that betrayed a virtue which as yet had never appeared in his selfish and altogether reckless life.