I've loved you ever since I saw you; men don't often love better than I have loved you; but I'd rather drag you, to-night, to that black river there, and hold you down with my own hands till the breath left your body, than see you turn into a sinful woman, and lead the life of shame you tell me you had it in your heart to lead, to-day." "Is it so very awful ?" I whispered with a shiver, my own emotion stilled before his.

"I only loved him!" "Forget you ever did," he said, rising, and pacing up and down the room.
I put my hands before my face, and felt as if I were alone in the world with sin.

If this unspoken, passionate, sweet thought, that I had harbored, were so full of danger as to force God to blast me with such punishment, as to drive this tender, generous, loving man to wish me dead, what must be the blackness of the sin from which I had been saved, if I were saved?
If there were, indeed, anything but shocks of woe and punishment, and deadly despair and darkness, in this strange world in which I found myself.

There was a silence.

I rose to my feet.