d in your hands was not given
you just to win the love of a woman, and I tell you frankly that you
will never win mine with it.

"More than this, if I saw you using it for such an end, I would take
care that you did not use it for long. No man ever had such an awful
responsibility laid upon him as the possession of this power lays
upon you. It is yours to make or mar the future of the human race, of
which I am but a unit. It is not the power that will ever win either
my respect or my love, but the wisdom and the justice with which it
may be used."

"Ah! I see you distrust me. You think that because I have the power
to be a despot, that therefore I may forget my oath and become one. I
forgive you for the thought, unworthy of you as it is, and also, I
hope, of me. No, Natasha; I am no skilled hand at love-making, for I
have never wooed any mistress but one before to-day, and she is won
only by plain honesty and hard service; just what I will devote to
the winning of you, whether you are to be won or not--but I must have
expressed myself clumsily indeed for you to have even thought of
treason to the Cause.

"You are no more devoted adherent of it than I am. You have suffered
in one way and I in another from the falsehood and rottenness of
present-day Society, but you do not hate it more utterly than I do,
and you would not go to greater lengths than I would to destroy it.
Yours is a hatred of emotion, and mine is a hatred of reason. I have
proved that, as Society is constituted, it is the worst and not the
best qualities of humanity that win wealth and power, and such
respect as the vulgar of all classes can give. But it is not such
power as this that I would lay at your feet, when I ask you to share
the world-empire with me. It is an empire of peace and not of war
that I shall offer to you."

"Then," said Natasha, taking a step towards him, and laying her hand
on his arm as she spoke, "when you have made war impossible to the
rivalry of nations and races, and have proclaimed peace on earth,
then I will give myself to you, body and soul, to do with as you
please, to kill or to keep alive, for then truly you will have done
that which all the generations of men before you have failed to do,
and it will be yours to ask and to have."

As she spoke these last words Natasha bowed her proudly-carried head
as though in submission to the dictum that her own lips had
pronounced; and Arnold, laying his hand on hers and holding