"Hear me! Do you think I beg you to
let my father go, for his sake? No! No! I have gloried in your Ranger
duty. I have loved you because of it. But some awful tragedy threatens
here. Listen, Vaughn Steele. Do not you deny me, as I kneel here. I love
you. I never loved any other man. But not for my love do I beseech you.
"There is no help here unless you forswear your duty. Forswear it! Do
not kill my father--the father of the woman who loves you. Worse and
more horrible it would be to let my father kill you! It's I who make
this situation unnatural, impossible. You must forswear your duty. I can
live no longer if you don't. I pray you--" Her voice had sunk to a
whisper, and now it failed. Then she seemed to get into his arms, to
wind herself around him, her hair loosened, her face upturned, white and
spent, her arms blindly circling his neck. She was all love, all
surrender, all supreme appeal, and these, without her beauty, would have
made her wonderful. But her beauty! Would not Steele have been less than
a man or more than a man had he been impervious to it? She was like some
snow-white exquisite flower, broken, and suddenly blighted. She was a
woman then in all that made a woman helpless--in all that made her
mysterious, sacred, absolutely and unutterably more than any other thing
in life.
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