Chapter 5 - Page 2

persuade and dissuade; all
eloquence to save her from herself and her salvation. If he loved
her less, he said with truth, he might have spoken less earnestly.
It was for her own sake he spoke, because he so loved her. He
waxed hot in his eager desire to prevent her from taking this fatal
step. He drew his breath hard, and paused. Emotion and anxiety
overcame him visibly.

But as for Herminia, though she listened with affection and with a
faint thrill of pleasure to much that he said, seeing how deeply he
loved her, she leaned back from time to time, half weary with his
eagerness, and his consequent iteration. "Dear Alan," she said at
last, soothing his hand with her own, as a sister might have
soothed it, "you talk about all this as though it were to me some
new resolve, some new idea of my making. You forget it is the
outcome of my life's philosophy. I have grown up to it slowly.
I have thought of all this, and of hardly anything else, ever since
I was old enough to think for myself about anything. Root and
branch, it is to me a foregone conclusion. I love you. You love
me. So far as I am concerned, there ends the question. One way
there is, and one way alone, in which I can give myself up to you.
Make me yours if you will; but if not, then leave me. Only,
remember, by leaving me, you won't any the more turn me aside from
my purpose. You won't save me from myself, as you call it; you
will only hand me over to some one less fit for me by far than you
are." A quiet moisture glistened in her eyes, and she gazed at him
pensively. "How wonderful it is," she went on, musing. "Three
weeks ago, I didn't know there was such a man in the world at all
as you; and now--why, Alan, I feel as if the world would be nothing
to me without you. Your name seems to sing in my ears all day long
with the song of the birds, and to thrill through and through me as
I lie awake on my pillow with the cry of the nightjar. Yet, if you
won't take me on my own terms, I know well what will happen. I
shall go away, and grieve over you, of course, and feel bereaved
for months, as if I could never possibly again love any man. At
present it seems to me I never could love him. But though my heart
tells me that, my reason tells me I should some day find some other
soul I might perhaps fall back upon. But it would only be falling
back. For the sake of my principles alone, and of the example I
wish to set the world, could I ever fall back upon any other. Yet
fall back I would. And what good would you have done me then by
refusing me? You would merely have cast me off from the man I love
best, the man who I know by immediate instinct, which is the voice
of nature and of God within us, was intended from