"Forget you! I wish I could forget you. I have thought of you so much that sometimes I wish I could forget you entirely. But I think 'tis out of my power to do so now. I think I should have to be quite dead—and even then I do not know—I am not sure—if you should speak to me I think I would hear," she says, wildly, and covering her eyes with her hand.
He looked at the dark-robed figure, the dark head bowed on the heaving breast, and suddenly a joy such as he had never thought to feel ran through his veins. He went over to her, and, lifting the hand from the closed eyes, he put it to his lips.
"Adrienne," he says, tenderly and wonderingly, "you are crying! Why?"
"I am crying for so many things! For joy and despair and hope and dead love, because this means nothing to you and everything to me, because I love you and you love me not, because you once loved me—!" She stopped in an access of anguish and, sobbing, knelt before him. The humility of true love had at last mastered her.
"Not to me—not to me," he said, unsteadily, lifting her.
"And why not to you? There is no one so true, no one I honor so much! In my pride and ignorance I thought you were not the equal of these fine gentlemen who have abandoned their King and their country. But I have learned to know you, and my own heart, and what I have thrown away! I am not ashamed to say this—to own to you that I love you." She threw back her head and looked at Calvert with eyes that shone with a sorrowful light. "For you once told me that you loved me, and though I know I have lost that love, the memory that I once had it will stay with me and be my pride forever."
"'Tis yours still, believe me," said Calvert. "'Tis yours now and forever—forever." He put his arm around her and drew her to him. "Far or near I have loved you since the first day I saw you, but I never dreamed that you would come to care, and in my pride I swore I would never tell you of my love after that day in the garden at Azay."
"I must have been mad, I think," she said, wonderingly. "Mad to have laughed at you—mad to have thrown away your love. Ah, I have learned since then!"
"'Tis like a miracle that you should have come to care for me," said
Calvert, his lips upon her dark hair.
"The hour you left me I knew that I loved you. Oh, the agony of that knowledge and the thought that I would never see you again! Even then my pride would not let me tell you—I thought you would come again—and then—then when later you turned from me—my heart broke, I think—'twas quite numb—I was neither sorry nor glad—" She stopped again.