"I love you, love you, love you," she replied.
"You love me! I bless you for it, Pepeeta, but there is something else that I must know."
"What can it be? Is not everything comprehended in that single word? It is all-embracing as the air! It enfolds life as the sky enfolds the world!"
"Ah! Pepeeta, you loved me when we parted, but you did not forgive me!"
She dropped her eyes.
"Have you forgiven me now?"
"It is not true that I did not forgive you," she replied, looking up at his face again. "There has never been in my heart for a single moment any sense of a wrong which I could not pardon. It has been one of the awful mysteries of this experience that I could not feel that wrong! When I tried to feel it most, my heart would say to me, 'you are not sorry that he loved you, Pepeeta! You would rather that all this agony should have befallen you than that he should not have loved you at all!' It is this feeling that has bewildered me, David. Explain it to me. Let me know how I could have such feelings in my heart and yet be good. It seems as if I ought to hate you; but I cannot. I love you, love you, love you."
"But, Pepeeta, if you loved me, why did you leave me? I do not comprehend. How could you let me stand in the darkness under your window and then turn away from it into the awful blackness and solitude to which I fled?"
"Do not reproach me, I thought it was my duty, David."
"I do not reproach you. I only want to know your inmost heart."