“You are not so well today. You look distressed. You have been weeping.”
He spoke so kindly, and with such a fervent tremor in his voice, that the tears gushed into her eyes at the sound of his words.
“Walter,” said Florence, gently, “I am not quite well, and I have been weeping. I want to speak to you.”
He sat down opposite to her, looking at her beautiful and innocent face; and his own turned pale, and his lips trembled.
“You said, upon the night when I knew that you were saved—and oh! dear Walter, what I felt that night, and what I hoped!—”
He put his trembling hand upon the table between them, and sat looking at her.
“—that I was changed. I was surprised to hear you say so, but I understand, now, that I am. Don’t be angry with me, Walter. I was too much overjoyed to think of it, then.”
She seemed a child to him again. It was the ingenuous, confiding, loving child he saw and heard. Not the dear woman, at whose feet he would have laid the riches of the earth.
“You remember the last time I saw you, Walter, before you went away?”
He put his hand into his breast, and took out a little purse.