She shook her head.
"She told me I loved you. And I do, Rose. Oh, I do! I do!"
"But that mustn't part you. Think what it is to me—to know my coming here has done it."
"Oh, you had to come!" said Peter light-heartedly. "It was preordained. It's destiny. I was a fool not to see it the first minute. She had to tell me."
Rose, in spite of herself, smiled a little. But her thoughts settled gravely back upon her own hard task.
"Did she tell you"—She hesitated, and then asked her question with a simple directness. "Did she tell you how much mistaken you are in me?"
"Please don't," said Peter. His face flushed. He looked his misery.
"You see she is the only one who was not mistaken in me. Those of you who believed in me—well, I must tell all of you. Even grannie, dear grannie! I am afraid—" She stopped because she meant to show no emotion; but it seemed to her that grannie, in her guarded life, must view her harshly. "I was wrong, Peter, ever to let you mix yourself in this miserable coil. If I could lie, well and good. Let me do it and take the consequences. But I should have known better than to bring you into it."
Peter stood thoughtfully regarding her in a very impersonal way, as if he debated how she could be moved.
"I wonder," he said at last, "how it is possible to tell you how lovely you are to everybody, how perfectly splendid, you know, quite different from anybody else! And when you add to that that you've been wronged and—and insulted—oh you've simply no conception how it makes a fellow feel! Why, I adore you, that's all. I just adore you."