it is over-much. I would be an honest man, look you. I have a
master to serve, I bid you remember. It is true enough that I love you
out of all measure; there is no sin in that which I cannot help; but
misery there is, by our Saviour. The sin is gaping all about me, itching
here, aching there, gnawing and groping without cease, or stint, or
allay. Yes, yes, I know this is true--God help me! I love you
deplorably; but I will not touch you. You are the ever-blessed thing to
me; but I will make you the ever-abhorred thing, _anathema maranatha_. I
love you, I worship you, I adore you; you are my saint, my church, my
altar, my soul's peculiar food; you shall be my devil, his hell, his
cauldron, my venomous offence. And all this you shall be that I may love
you yet more, yet incomprehensibly more, and (withal) live honest. I
will hate you because I adore you. Ah! and I will prove whether by
hating you most of all I cannot drown myself in love." He threw himself
out of her reach, and rocked with hidden face.

Here was pretty hearing for a pretty bride. Molly, with heaving bosom,
stood abashed and dumb, and troubled profoundly. Not only had she never
tried to stem so fierce a torrent of love, nor ever shuddered under such
dry heat in men's words--she had never yet dreamed of so much passion in
men created. And glorious passion, too, it seemed, so stern and
repressed--a passion which hugged a fetter, a splendid misery of denial.
Of course she had nothing to say; she never had anything to say; yet she
longed to say or do something. Her interest in all these fine things
was painful, if delicious; and it never occurred to her for a moment
that it could be a sin to listen where it was evidently such a virtue to
declare. She was conscious of no disloyalty to Amilcare in so listening,
in being so troubled, in displaying her trouble so unaffectedly. Poor,
poor, good Grifone! So very noble, so white and miserable; Heaven knows
she would have satisfied him if she could. With her, to feel was to
touch (if I may so put it); quite instinctively she stretched out her
arms to draw him home; the good fool would have kissed his tears away if
he had had any, giving him for comfort what he had screamed upon as a
torment. But that was a talent denied to Grifone: he could not cry. All
the same, she was at the point to kiss him, when he once more prevented
her--this time without violence.

"Ah, my lady, my lady," he said, with a smile whimsically sa