"Now?" said Sydney. She felt that the arm on which she leaned was trembling like a leaf.
"Now I could love you better than ever—if I knew one thing—if I dared ask——"
"You may ask what you like," he said, in a husky voice.
"It is not such a very great thing," she said, simply; "it is only what you yourself think about the past: whether you think with me that it is something to be sorry about, or something to be justified. I feel as if I could forget it if I knew that you were sorry; and if you justified it—as some men would do—oh, I should never reproach you, Sydney, but I would much rather die!"
There was a silence. His head was on the cushion beside her, but his face was hidden, and she could gather only from his loud, quick breathing that he was deeply moved. But it was some time before he spoke. "I don't try to justify myself," he said, at last. "I was wrong—I know it well enough—and—well if you must have me say it—God knows that I am—sorry."
"Ah," she said, "that is all I wanted you to say. Oh Sydney, my darling, can anything now but death come between you and me?"
And she drew his head down upon her bosom and let it rest there, dearer in the silent shame that bowed it before her than in the heyday of its pride.
So they were reconciled, and the past sin and sorrow were slowly blotted out in waters of repentance. Before the world, Sydney Campion is still the gay, confident, successful man that he has always been—a man who does not make many friends, and who has, or appears to have, an overweening belief in his own powers. But there is a softer strain in him as well. Within his heart there is a chamber held sacred from the busy world in which he moves: and here a woman is enshrined, with all due observance, with lights burning and flowers blooming, as his patron saint. It is Nan who presides here, who knows the inmost recesses of his thought, who has gauged the extent of his failures and weakness as well as his success, who is conscious of the strength of his regrets as well as the burdensome weight of a dead sin. And in her, therefore, he puts the trust which we can only put in those who know all sides of us, the worst side even as the best: on her he has even come to lean with that sense of uttermost dependence, that feeling of repose, which is given to us only in the presence of a love that is more than half divine.