But though it were true that you loved me as madly and disinterestedly as you professed, had I known your character, never, _never_ should I have held speech with you, much less admitted you to terms of familiarity--a fact which I look back upon with the deepest mortification.

Let me pass, sir, and never venture to approach me again." "No you don't, my haughty miss! I'm not done with you yet," he exclaimed between his clenched teeth, and seizing her rudely by the arm as she tried to step past him.

"So you're engaged to that fatherly friend of yours, that pious sneak, that deadly foe to me ?" "Unhand me, sir!" "Not yet," he answered, tightening his grasp, and at the same time taking a pistol from his pocket.

"I swear you shall never marry that man: promise me on your oath that you'll not, or--I'll shoot you through the heart; the heart that's turned false to me.

D'ye hear," and he held the muzzle of his piece within a foot of her breast.
Every trace of color fled from her face, but she stood like a marble statue, without speech or motion of a muscle, her eyes looking straight into his with firm defiance.
"Do you hear ?" he repeated, in a tone of exasperation, "speak! promise that you'll never marry Travilla, or I'll shoot you in three minutes--shoot you down dead on the spot, if I swing for it before night." "That will be as God pleases," she answered low and reverently; "you can have no power at all against me except it be given you from above." "I can't, hey?
looks like it; I've only to touch the trigger here, and your soul's out o' your body.