“If you could only find it in your heart,” he exclaimed, “how much I could do for you, how much you could do for me.  Look at all this.  It’s a home, but it’s just a desert—­a desert—­the way it is now.”

“Has it always been so?”

“As long as I can remember.”

“So you desire to make all life a desert for me!  It is very noble of you!”

Absorbed, he seemed not to hear her.  “Suppose you had met me the way people usually meet—­and you some time had allowed me to come and address you—­could you have done that, do you reckon?” He turned to her, an intent frown on his face, unsmiling.

“That’s a question which here at least is absurd,” she replied.

“You spoke once of that other country, abroad,—­” he broke off, shaking his head.  “Who are you?  I don’t feel sure that I even know your name as yet.”

“I am, as you have been told, Josephine, Countess St. Auban.  I am French, Hungarian, American, what you like, but nothing to you.  I came to this country in the interest of Louis Kossuth.  For that reason I have been misunderstood.  They think me more dangerous than I am, but it seems I am honored by the suspicions of Austria and America as well.  I was a revolutionist yonder.  I am already called an abolitionist here.  Very well.  The name makes little difference.  The work itself—­”

“Is that how you happened to be there on the boat?”

“I suppose so.  I was a prisoner there.  I was less than a chattel.  I was a piece of property, to be staked, to be won or lost at cards, to be kidnapped, hand-cuffed, handled like a slave, it seems.  And you’ve the hardihood to stand here and ask me who I am!”

“I’ve only that sort of hardihood, Madam, which makes me ride straight.  If I had observed the laws, I wouldn’t have you here now, this morning.”

“You’ll not have me long.  If I despise you as a man without chivalry, I still more do so because you’ve neither ambition nor any sense of morals.”

“You go on to improve me.  I thank you, Mademoiselle—­Eleazar was right.  I heard him.  I like you as ‘Mademoiselle.’”

“What difference?” she flared out.  “We are opposed at all angles of the human compass.  There is no common meeting ground between us.  Let me go.”

He looked at her full in the face, his own features softened, relenting for a time, as though her appeal had touched either his mental or his moral nature.  Then slowly, as he saw the excellence of her, standing there, his face dropped back into its iron mold.  “You are a wonderful woman,” he said, “wonderful.  You set me on fire—­and it’s only eight o’clock in the morning.  I could crush you—­I could tear you to pieces.  I never saw your like, nor ever shall.  Let you go?  Yes!  When I’m willing to let my blood and soul go.  Not till then.  If I were out in that graveyard, with my bones apart, and your foot crossed my grave, I’d get up and come, and live again with you—­live—­again.  I say, I could live again, do you hear me?”