‘You will not?’ he exclaimed, aghast at the prospect of a battle worse than the first.
‘No,’ she answered, still grasping his wrists and gazing into his face with her fiery eyes. ‘I will not, and I know that I am strong. I feel it.’
During nearly a minute neither spoke, but Hilda’s hold did not relax for a second, and her lids did not once veil the intensity of her look. Even if Greif had possessed a wider experience of women than he had, it would not have helped him much. He was utterly at a loss. His manly nature would have provided him with weapons to rid himself of a woman of coarser instincts, even if he had loved her to distraction, provided he had felt that he must part from her. He would have felt that he could dominate a baser affection and force it down to his will, by sheer strength of purpose, no matter at what cost; but he was met here by something he had never understood, and he did not know what to do. The childlike innocence of Hilda’s maiden love gave an extraordinary character to her passion. The absence of anything like the common expressions of love made the transcendent power of what moved her stand out in magnificent grandeur. Never in his life had he dreamt that her quiet and undemonstrative affection was capable of anything but a calm and beautiful development. He had not guessed the existence of such resistless force as blazed from her eyes, he had believed her only capable of receiving, he had not imagined that she was strong enough to take boldly what was refused her. The radiance of a spotless soul, burning in the white-heat of a passion as pure as itself, dazzled and awed him. As he looked, he felt as though he were held in the grasp of a splendid, wrathful angel, who disputed the possession of him, not with himself, but with the opposing powers of evil.
It is amazing that in such a case he should still have found strength and courage to resist this last great trial of his sincerity. Most men would have yielded and would have accepted their fate. But though Greif was young, and not very wise, he had stern and obstinate blood in his veins, and he was acting under the strongest conviction that had ever possessed him. Knowing her only as he had known her before, the fair and innocent idol of his boyish heart, he had felt that he could never allow her to take his darkened name. In the beginning his intention had been very honourable, in his struggle with himself it had grown high and chivalrous, but in the face of such opposition as he met from her mother and now from herself, it had assumed proportions that bordered upon the grotesque. And yet as he looked now upon her noble face, illuminated and radiant with a beauty almost too pure for him to understand, he felt even more than before that such a creature could never be allowed to ally herself with one whose name was a reproach among men. He did not know how to oppose her, but he knew that she must be opposed, at any cost, for her own sake.