l enough to fancy that I
could forget you--conquer my love for;" and at these words his whole
voice and manner changed in an instant into wildest passion. "I must
speak--now and never more--I love you still, fool that I am! Would God I
had never seen you! No, not that. Thank God for that to the last: but
would God I had died of that cholera! that I had never come here,
conceited fool that I was, fancying that it was possible, after having
once--No! Let me go, go anywhere, where I may burden you no more with my
absurd dreams!--You, who have had the same thing said to you, and in
finer words, a hundred times, by men who would not deign to speak to
me!" and covering his face in his hands, he strode on, as if to escape.

"I never had the same thing said to me!"

"Never? How often have fine gentlemen, noblemen, sworn that they were
dying for you?"

"They never have said to me what you have done."

"No--I am clumsy, I suppose--"

"Mr. Headley, indeed you are unjust to yourself--unjust to me!"

"I--to you? Never! I know you better than you know yourself--see in you
what no one else sees. Oh, what fools they are who say that love is
blind! Blind? He sees souls in God's own light; not as they have become:
but as they ought to become--can become--are already in the sight of Him
who made them!"

"And what might I become?" asked she, half-frightened by the new
earnestness of his utterance.

"How can I tell! Something infinitely too high for me, at least, who
even now am not worthy to kiss the dust off your feet."

"Oh, do not speak so: little do you know--! No, Mr. Headley, it is you
who are too good for me; too noble, single-eyed, self-sacrificing, to
endure my vanity and meanness for a day."

"Madam, do not speak thus! Give me no word which my folly can distort
into a ray of hope, unless you wish to drive me mad. No! it is
impossible; and, were it possible, what but ruin to my soul? I should
live for you, and not for my work. I should become a schemer, ambitious,
intriguing, in the vain hope of proving myself to the world worthy of
you. No; let it be. 'Let the dead bury their dead, and follow thou me.'"

She made no answer--what answer was there to make? And he strode on by
her side in silence for full ten minutes. At last she was forced to
speak.

"Mr. Headley, recollect that this conversation has gone too far for us
to avoid coming to some definite understanding--"

"Then it shall, Miss St. Just. Then it shall,