I bow my head and wait, and a terrible doubt crosses my mind us to whether I am acting for good or for evil in demanding this supreme expiation of a life. The silence is so long and unbroken that time seems to stand still; when he speaks his voice seems to come from a long way off. I lift my eyes and look at him, and in his there is the beaten, broken look that never comes into a man's face until the last hope is gone—the last stake lost.
"You have conquered," he says. "I will do it for your sake. Could any man do more? You must give me a little while to get used to the idea, a little while to get rid of some of my prejudices (he laughs harshly), then she shall be offered a place in my house as the mistress of it, to be treated by me as any other stranger within my gates; if she refuses, she can live alone."
A sick, jealous pain, the first that has begun to stir my dull heart, awakes as I look at him. What if he grow to love her again? Is she not fair as the day? and do men remember for ever? And I am sending him back to her! There is a little bitter silence, and then Paul kneels down in the snow and looks into my face, but I do not look at him: my heart is waking from its torpor, and I dare not. Yesterday he was my lover, to-day he is Silvia's husband. Not in one moment can I pass from the familiar friendship to the new unnatural position we hold towards each other.
"You have fixed my lot, child; what is to be your own?"
"I shall live."
"Will ever any one fill my place?"
"Never."
"No one man more than another?"
"No man."
"I was always a selfish brute," he says, slowly; "I am selfish still, and I tell you that I would rather see you lying in your coffin with violets in your pale hands, than know you to be another
