He sat down on the step at her feet, and raised his dark magnetic face, glowing with the love which had so long burned undimmed, his lofty full forehead wearing a strange flush.
She dared not meet his eye, and drooped her head on her palms, shrinking from the scorching furnace of trial, whose red jaws yawned to receive her. He waited a moment, and his low mellow voice rose to a stormy key.
"Irene, you are kind and merciful to the poor wretches in the Row. Poverty—nay, crime, does not frighten away your compassion for them! Why are you hard and cruelly haughty only to me?"
"You do not need my sympathy, Mr. Aubrey, and congratulations on your great success would not come gracefully from my lips. Most unfortunate obstacles long since rendered all intercourse between us impossible still; my feeling for you has undergone no change. I am, I assure you, still your friend."
It cost her a powerful effort to utter these words, and her voice took a metallic tone utterly foreign to it. Her heart writhed, bled and moaned in the grip of her steely purpose, but she endured all calmly—relaxing not one jot of her bitter resolution.
"My friend? Mockery! God defend me from such henceforth. Irene, you loved me once—nay, don't deny it! You need not blush for the early folly, which, it seems, you have interred so deeply; and though you scorn to meet me even as an equal, I know, I feel, that I am worthy of your love—that I comprehend your strange nature as no one else ever will—that, had such a privilege been accorded me, I could have kindled your heart, and made you supremely happy. Cursed barriers have divided us always; fate denied me my right. I have suffered many things; but does it not argue, at least, in favour of my love, that it has survived all the trials to which your father's hate had subjected me? To-night I could forgive him all! all! if I knew that he had not so successfully hardened, closed your heart against me. My soul is full of bitterness which would move you, if one trait of your girlish nature remained. But you are not my Irene! The world's queen, the dazzling idol of the ball-room, is not my blue-eyed, angelic Irene of old! I will intrude upon you no longer. Try at least not to despise me for my folly; I will crush it; and if you deign to remember me at all in future, think of a man who laughs at his own idiocy, and strives to forget that he ever believed there lived one woman who would be true to her own heart, even though the heavens fell and the world passed away!"
He rose partially, but her hand fell quickly upon his shoulder, and the bowed face lifted itself, stainless as starry jasmines bathed in equatorial dews.
"Mr. Aubrey, you are too severe upon yourself, and very unjust to me. The circumstances which conspired to alienate us were far beyond my control; I regret them as sincerely as you possibly can, but as unavailably. If I have individually occasioned you sorrow or disappointment, God knows it was no fault of mine! We stand on the opposite shores of a dark, bridgeless gulf; but before we turn away to be henceforth strangers, I stretch out my hand to you in friendly farewell—deeply regretting the pain which I may have innocently caused you, and asking your forgiveness. Mr. Aubrey, remember me as I was, not as I am. Good-bye, my friend. May God bless you in coming years, and crown your life with the happiness you merit, is the earnest prayer of my heart."
The rare blue cord on her brow told how fiercely the lava-flood surged under its icy bands, and the blanched lip matched her cheek in colourlessness; save these tokens of anguish, no other was visible.
Russell drew down the hand from his shoulder, and folded it in both his own.