"
"You have European ideas, you tell me," she said, bitterly; "is this one
of them?"
"It is, and the least among them, perhaps; yet it is, nevertheless, hard
to overcome positive repulsion."
There was a pause now, during which I could count every throb of my
heart, and throat, and temples--my whole frame was transfigured into an
anvil, on which a thousand tiny hammers seemed to ring. Yet I could not
move, nor speak, nor weep--no wretchedness was ever more supreme than
this cataleptic seizure. Evelyn was the first to break the transient
silence.
"Your path is a plain one, Claude Bainrothe; fulfill your contract,
sealed with gold, and bear patiently your selected lot."
"Evelyn, one word--let it be sincere: do you hate and scorn me? Answer
me as you would speak to your own soul."
"No, Claude, no, yet the blow was hard to bear--struck, too, as you must
reflect, so suddenly! Only the day before abandonment, remember, you had
made protestations of such undying constancy. Your conduct was surely
inconstant, at least."
"I make them still, those professions you scorn so deeply."
"Away, false man, lest the sleeper awaken!"
"You say there is no danger of that, and that in their coffins the dead
are not more insensible."
"To see you kneeling at my feet might bring the dead even to life," she
laughed, contemptuously.
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