"Why, some men might, you know."—Her eyes were bent again upon her work.—"You yourself—you had them, you know, when you first knew me."
He flushed. "Don't remind me of that," he said, hastily.
"Well, it may have been a true presentiment."—She gave him an odd, furtive look. "I've wondered—sometimes—if I were as nice naturally as other girls I know. I hadn't, to begin with, the sort of mother that—most girls have"——She hesitated, a painful crimson flooded her face, her eyes filled with tears. Gerard stared at her in amazement. He had never heard her allude to her mother before, and had supposed her entirely ignorant of all painful facts in the family history.
"Darling," he broke out, indignantly, "who has told you—things like that?"
"Who? Oh! I don't know."—She put the question aside listlessly.—"One always hears unpleasant facts, somehow. I always knew that she wasn't the—the sort of person that the Neighborhood would call on"—a painful smile hovered about her lips. "It used to make me very unhappy—but lately—it hasn't seemed to matter. And yet—I think of it sometimes"——She broke off suddenly and looked at Gerard with a strange light in her eyes. "Doesn't it make a difference to you? Doesn't it occur to you sometimes that I may be—my mother's daughter; that it would be wiser to—distrust me?" Her voice died away at the last words into a hoarse whisper.
"Elizabeth!"—Gerard sprang to his feet. He went over to her and took both her hands in his strong grasp. "Elizabeth, never let me hear these morbid fancies again. Never suppose that anything your mother did or left undone, can make a difference in my faith in you!"
He stood looking down at her with eyes full of an imperious tenderness. She trembled and shrank away before them, as if frightened. "You trust me, then?" she repeated, and she drew a long sobbing breath. "You're quite sure you trust me?"
"Absolutely."—Gerard's smile lit up his face.—"How often, you exacting woman," he asked, "do you want me to promise that I will never doubt you again."
There was silence for a moment. The noises in the street sounding suddenly with redoubled violence in the stillness, seemed to punctuate Gerard's words with an outburst of derision. To Elizabeth's fancy the whole atmosphere of the room was tense, vibrant, filled with jarring echoes of the noise without. Even the old Dutch clock, whose ticking was one of her earliest memories, seemed to beat with a new, discordant note of mockery, as if it too were uttering its ironical comment on the wisdom of a man's faith.
Elizabeth shuddered and thrust Gerard's hands away. "I wish—I wish I deserved your trust, Julian," she broke out, wildly. Then she laid her face on the arm of the chair and sobbed. He fell back and stared at her aghast. The tender smile was arrested, frozen on his lips. For him, too, as for her, the room was suddenly filled with discordant vibrations, a sense of unreasoning dread.