“There was nothing unbecoming in what you did.”
“Yes, there was, though. There was this: I was satisfied to hold an ambiguous position,—to be a something, neither master nor servant, in another man's house, all because it gave me the daily happiness to be near you, and to see you, and to hear your voice. That was unbecoming, and the best proof of it was, that with all my love and all my devotion, you could not care for me.”
“Oh, Tony! do not say that.”
“When I say care, you could not do more than care; you couldn't love me.”
“Were you not always as a dear brother to me?”
“I wanted to be more than brother, and when I found that this could not be, I grew very careless, almost reckless, of my life; not but that it took a long time to teach me the full lesson. I had to think over, not only all that separated us in station, but all that estranged us in tone of mind; and I saw that your superiority to me chafed me, and that if you should ever come to feel for me, it would be through some sense of pity.”
“Oh, Tony!”
“Yes, Alice, you know it better than I can say it; and so I set my pride to fight against my love, with no great success at first. But as I lay wounded in the orchard at Melazzo, and thought of my poor mother, and her sorrow if she were to hear of my death, and compared her grief with what yours would be, I saw what was real in love, and what was mere interest; and I remember I took out my two relics,—the dearest objects I had in the world,—a lock of my mother's hair and a certain glove,—a white glove you may have seen once on a time; and it was over the little braid of brown hair I let fall the last tears I thought ever to shed in life; and here is the glove—I give it back to you. Will you have it?”
She took it with a trembling hand; and in a voice of weak but steady utterance said, “I told you that this time would come.”
“You did so,” said he, gloomily.