“Do I look as if I hated you?” she again interposed, this time with the look of an angel in her sad but beautiful eyes.
“Ah, Grace,” he cried, with the passion of a dozen years let loose in one uncontrollable flood, “you cannot love me, not after all these years. When we parted——”
“At whose instigation, Oswald?”
“At mine, at mine, I know it. Do not reproach me with that, for I could not have done differently.—I thought, I dreamed that it was with almost as much pain on your side as mine. But you married, Grace, married very soon.”
“Still at whose instigation?”
“Again at mine. I dared not keep you from any comfort which life might have in store for you, and the years which you have spent in happiness and honor must have obliterated some of the traces of that love which bound our lives together fifteen years ago.”
“Oswald, Mr. Unwin was a good husband and Clarke has always been like an own son to me, but——”
“Oh,” interposed the doctor, starting back before the beauty of her face, “don’t tell me that a woman’s heart can, like a man’s, be the secret sepulchre of a living passion for fifteen years. I could not bear to know that! The struggle which I waged fourteen years ago I have not strength to wage now. No! no! woman of my dreams, of my heart’s dearest emotion, loved once, loved now, loved always! tell me anything but that,—tell me even that you hate me.”
Her eyes, which had fallen before his, swam suddenly with tears and she started as if for protection toward the door.
“Oh, I must go,” she cried. “Clarke is waiting; it is not wise; it is not seemly for me to be here.” But the doctor, into whom a fiery glow had entered, was beside her before she could reach the threshold. “No, no,” he pleaded, “not till you have uttered one word, one whisper of the old story; one assurance—Ah, now I am entreating for the very thing, the existence of which, I deprecated a few minutes ago! It shows how unbalanced I am. Yes, yes, you can go; but, Grace, if you have ever doubted that I loved you, listen to this one confession. Ever since the day we parted, necessarily parted, fourteen years ago, I have never let a week go by till these last few ones during which I have been away from Hamilton, that I have not given up two nights a week to thinking of you and watching you.”