So she thought who bent over him now with soothing words.
“Ronald, you will break my heart if you do this. There has been a terrible mistake, but it will be made right for us in another world. We have one comfort—we did love each other. God knows what has parted us; it is not untruth or falsity. Oh, Ronald! does it not comfort you to know this?”
All that answered her was the deep-drawn, bitter sobs that shook his strong frame, and the sweet, rustling sound of the bells in the breeze.
“If I had been false to you, as you believed, Ronald, the memory of me would have been a lifelong pain. If you had been false to me, the very thought of you would have been a perpetual sorrow; but now we may remember without sin that we once loved each other in all truth.”
She was startled when he raised his face to her, and clutched her hand in his strong grasp.
“Oh, my lost love, my lost, dearest, only love! what has parted us? Tell me! I must know—I will know!”
“I cannot tell,” she replied, gently laying her white, cool, soft hand on his hot brow. “I cannot even imagine. All I am certain of is that I never until this morning even heard of such a letter.”
“Who has done it?” he cried, wildly. “Oh, Hermione, do you know I have been mad for love of you, and for the loss of you? Do you know that, after I believed you rejected me, I have lived like a man without reason, without soul? My days and nights have been one long dream of anguish, one long madness. I hate the sun that shines, the night that succeeds day, for no time will ever bring you back to me, and without you life is death.”
“You forget,” she interrupted, gently. “You have your wife, Clarice, who loves you.”
“I do not forget. Poor Clarice!—God pity her and pity me! I do not love her, Hermione. I have tried as hard to love her as I have to forget you, but cannot. I pray Heaven to pardon me the wrong I did in marrying her; I was blind enough to think it for the best. Oh, my lost love, I am going mad! Lay your cool hands on my brow again; fight down the demons who master me, my angel, my loadstar, my treasure! And you would have married me, Hermione? You would have made my life heaven instead of what it is. I might have been the happiest, even as I am the most wretched, of men.”