her that priceless gem.

And while she wept to herself in solitude, and her brother Denzil
wandered about in the gardens of the hotel, encouraging within
himself hopes of winning the bewitching Ziska for a wife, Armand
Gervase, shut up in his room under plea of slight indisposition,
reviewed the emotions of the past night and tired to analyze them.
Some men are born self-analysts, and are able to dissect their
feelings by some peculiar form of mental surgery which finally
leads them to cut out tenderness as though it were a cancer, love
as a disease, and romantic aspirations as mere uncomfortable
growths injurious to self-interest, but Gervase was not one of
these. Outwardly he assumed more or less the composed and careless
demeanor of the modern French cynic, but inwardly the man was a
raging fire of fierce passions which were sometimes too strong to
be held in check. At the present moment he was prepared to
sacrifice everything, even life itself, to obtain possession of
the woman he coveted, and he made no attempt whatever to resist
the tempest of desire that was urging him on with an invincible
force in a direction which, for some strange and altogether
inexplicable reason, he dreaded. Yes, there was a dim sense of
terror lurking behind all the wild passion that filled his soul--a
haunting, vague idea that this sudden love, with its glowing ardor
and intoxicating delirium, was like the brilliant red sunset which
frequently prognosticates a night of storm, ruin and death. Yet,
though he felt this presentiment like a creeping shudder of cold
through his blood, it did not hold him back, or for a moment
impress him with the idea that it might be better to yield no
further to this desperate love-madness which enthralled him.