“You have not thought more hardly of me than I of you. I believed that night you loved me, and I was—well, it does not matter how happy; then you came and went without saying one word. Suddenly you absented yourself altogether; you never came near me. I met you, and you avoided me. I knew no more until I heard and knew that you were going to Mount Severn.”
His face was not pleasant to look upon as she uttered these words.
“Then you never read it, Hermione, or knew of my writing at all?”
“Not one word,” she said, earnestly.
There were a few moments of silence, unbroken save by the wind among the harebells.
“Answer me only one more question, and I have done,” he said. “If you had received my letter, what would your answer have been?”
The light he remembered so well came into her face; for a few moments she forgot the barrier between them that could never be passed.
“You know what it would have been, Ronald. I—I should have said ‘Yes,’ because I have loved you, and you alone, all my life.”
Then the words died on her lips, for, strong and brave as he was, he had flung himself face downward among the harebells, and lay there, sobbing like a child.
A strong man’s tears are terrible to see. Women weep, and, though one pities them, it seems but natural. When a proud, self-controlled, high-spirited man breaks down and weeps, the grief is terrible to witness.