influenced by little things, but yielded absolutely to the supreme impulses of his life.  If she said the word, he would make good his promise with chivalrous, straightforward promptness, facing death, and all that death could then mean to him, with a light, half-jaunty courage characteristic of the ideal soldier.  She had a secret wonder at herself that she could know all this and yet be so vividly conscious that what he asked could never be.  Her womanly pity said yes; her woman’s heart said no.  He was eager to take her in his arms, to place the kiss of life-long loyalty on her lips; but in her very soul she felt that it would be almost sacrilege for him to touch her; since the divine impulse to yield, without which there can be no divine sanction, was absent.

She listened, not as a confused, frightened girl, while he spoke that which she had guessed before.  Other men had sued, although none had spoken so eloquently or backed their words by such weight of character.  Her trouble, her deep perplexity, was not due to a mere declaration, but was caused by her inability to answer him.  The conventional words which she would have spoken a few days before died on her lips.  They would be an insult to this earnest man, who had the right to hope for something better.  What was scarcely worse—­for there are few emergencies in which egotism is wholly lost—­she would appear at once to him and to herself in an odious light.  Her course would be well characterized by the Irish servant’s lover, for here was a man who from the very fineness of his nature, if wronged, might easily go to the devil.

His words echoed her thought, for her hesitation and the visible distress on her face led him to exclaim, in a voice tense with something like agony:  “O Marian, since you hesitate, hesitate longer.  Think well before you mar—­nay, spoil—­my life.  For God’s sake don’t put me off with some of the sham conventionalities current with society girls.  I could stand anything better than that.  I am in earnest; I have always been in earnest; and I saw from the first, through all your light, graceful disguises, that you were not a shallow, brainless, heartless creature,—­that a noble woman was waiting to be wakened in your nature.  Give me time; give yourself time.  This is not a little affair that can be rounded off according to the present code of etiquette; it is a matter of life or death to me.  Be more merciful than a rebel bullet.”

She buried her face in her hands and sobbed helplessly.

He was capable of feeling unknown depths of tenderness, but there was little softness in his nature.  As he looked down upon her, his face grew rigid and stern.  In her sobs he read his answer,—­the unwillingness, probably the inability, of her heart to respond to his,—­and he grew bitter as he thought of the past.