"Don't—don't come near me! Oh, how could I have forgotten!—how could
I! I must have been mad!"
She wrung her hands and bit her lips as if she were tortured by the shame of it. His arms fell to his sides, and he stood and looked at her with his teeth set.
"Ida, listen to me! I—I, too—had forgotten. It—it was the delight of seeing you. But, dearest, what does the past matter? It is past, I have come back to you."
She turned to him with suppressed passion.
"Why did you leave me?" came painfully from her white lips.
His face grew red and his eyes fell before hers for a moment. At times his sacrifice of her to his father's need had seemed not only inexcusable, but shameful; the shame of it now weighed upon him.
"Ida, for God's sake listen to me!" for, as he had hesitated, she had turned from him with a gesture of repudiation. "Listen to me! There was nothing else for me to do; fate left me no alternative. My father—Ida, how can I tell you!—my father's good name, his reputation, were in my hands. He had done so much for me—everything! There has never been a father like him: my happiness stood between him and ruin—ah, not mine alone, but yours—and I sacrificed them! If you knew all you would forgive me the wrong I did, great as it was. I think now, if the time were to come over again, that—yes, I should have to do it!" he broke out. "I could not have stood by and seen-him ruined and disgraced without stretching out my hand to save him."
"It was for your father's sake?" she said, almost inaudibly.
"Yes," he responded, grimly. "And it saved him—saved his good name, at any rate. The rest went—you have heard?"
She made a gesture of assent. He drew a long breath, and held out his hand to her.