"What confidence you have in me?" she cried. "What have you seen, what can you see in me to make you trust me so in face of my own words?"
"I think it is the look in your eyes. There is purity there, Hermione, and a deep sadness which is too near like sorrow to be the result of an evil action."
"What do you call evil?" she cried. Then suddenly, "I once did a great wrong—in a fit of temper—and I can never undo it, never, yet its consequences are lasting. Would you give your heart to a woman who could so forget herself, and who is capable of forgetting herself again if her passions are roused as they were then?"
"Perhaps not," he acknowledged, "but my heart is already given and I do not know how to take it back."
"Yet you must," said she. "No man with a career before him should marry a recluse, and I am that, whatever else I may or may not be. I would be doing a second ineffaceable wrong if I took advantage of your generous impulse and bound you to a fate that in less than two months would be intolerably irksome to one of your temperament."
"Now you do not know me," he protested.
But she heeded neither his words nor his pleading look.
"I know human nature," she avowed, "and if I do not mingle much with the world I know the passions that sway it. I can never be the wife of any man, Mr. Etheridge, much less of one so generous and so self-forgetting as yourself."
"Do you—are you certain?" he asked.
"Certain."