ambition would prove nothing now. It is easy to repent when our
pleasures have palled. I told you in a letter four years ago that your
protests came too late. They are always too late. With a nature like
yours nothing is sure or lasting. Everything changes with the mood.
It is different with me: I speak only what I truly mean. Believe me,
for I tell you the truth, you are a man that a woman could forget but
could never forgive. As a prince you are much better than as a plain
man, for princes may do what other men may not. It is their way to take
all and give nothing. You should have been born a prince, then all your
actions would have seemed natural. Yet now you must remain a prince, for
what you got at such a price to others you must pay for. You say you
would come down from your high place, you would give up your worldly
honours, for me. What madness! You are not the kind of man with whom a
woman could trust herself in the troubles and changes of life. Laying
all else aside, if I would have had naught of your honours and your duchy
long ago, do you think I would now share a disgrace from which you could
never rise? For in my heart I feel that this remorse is but caprice.
It is to-day; it may not--will not--be tomorrow."

"You are wrong, you are wrong. I am honest with you now," he broke in.

"No," she answered coldly, "it is not in you to be honest. Your words
have no ring of truth in my ears, for the note is the same as I heard
once upon the Ecrehos. I was a young girl then and I believed; I am a
woman now, and I should still disbelieve though all the world were on
your side to declare me wrong. I tell you"--her voice rose again, it
seemed to catch the note of freedom and strength of the storm without--
"I tell you, I will still live as my heart and conscience prompt me.
The course I have set for myself I will follow; the life I entered upon
when my child was born I will not leave. No word you have said has made