"You must know that I love you," he said. Then in a low voice which vibrated keenly with intense feeling he added, "I have lived for this hour during all these interminable months. I have risen up each new day, thinking it brought me a day nearer to it and to you. I know all you have suffered. Let me try to make you forget. Give your precious life into my keeping, Isla. You are the only woman I have ever cared for. The knowledge that you were waiting somewhere for me has kept me a boy in heart for your sake. Will you give yourself to me?"
There was terror, anguish, hopelessness in her eyes. She gave a small shuddering sigh and buried her face in her hands. Instantly he was on his knees beside her, trying with a very gentle force to take her hands away.
Suddenly she drew back, rose to her feet, and faced him--very pale, very stricken, but wholly calm.
"Oh, please don't say any more. I--I must not listen. It was even wicked of me to come here when I knew--when I knew--and even hoped that you would speak. I--I am not free. I am the promised wife of another man."
Rosmead's face became set like a stone.
"But you are the woman God has given to me," he said quietly. "Who is the man?"
"Neil Drummond," she answered feverishly. "Don't look at me like that! Let me sit down again, and you stand where you were before and I will tell you how it came about. You said that you knew all I have suffered. But you don't. I want to tell you everything. Then you will understand."
He obeyed her to the letter, and with the breadth of the hearth between them she began her recital.
She went back a long way, even to the days of her troubled girlhood, keeping nothing back, telling him in simple language all the story of her life.
All unconscious was she of its complete self-revelation. Peter Rosmead, listening, with only a brief word interjected here and there, was filled with a pity so vast that he did not know how to contain himself. He saw this young woman-creature, at the time when she ought to have been enjoying girlhood, doing not only a woman's work in the world but also forced to act the man's part--to face abnormal difficulties, to solve the problems of existence in loneliness and without help.