"You see my 'fetters' are as loose as they are light, and nothing binds
me but my will. Read my heart, if you can. You will find there contempt
for a love so poor that it feared poverty; pity for a man who dared not
face the world and conquer it, as a girl had done before him, and
gratitude that I have found my 'master' in a truehearted boy, not a
falsehearted man. If I am a slave, I never know it. Can you say as
much?"
Her woman's tongue avenged her, and Gilbert owned his defeat. Pain
quenched the ire of his glance, remorse subdued his pride, self-
condemnation compelled him to ask, imploringly, "Pauline, when may I
hope for pardon?"
"Never."
The stern utterance of the word dismayed him, and, like one shut out
from hope, he rose, as if to leave her, but paused irresolutely, looked
back, then sank down again, as if constrained against his will by a
longing past control. If she had doubted her power this action set the
doubt at rest, as the haughtiest nature she had known confessed it by a
bittersweet complaint. Eyeing her wistfully, tenderly, Gilbert murmured,
in the voice of long ago, "Why do I stay to wound and to be wounded by
the hand that once caressed me? Why do I find more pleasure in your
contempt than in another woman's praise, and feel myself transported
into the delights of that irrecoverable past, now grown the sweetest,
saddest memory of my life? Send me away, Pauline, before the old charm
asserts its power, and I forget that I am not the happy lover of a year
ago.
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