"I shall never see you again," Margaret answered, strangely. She had not seated herself in the chair he had placed for her; she stood with her hand resting upon its back.
"What do you mean?"
"All you have said I believe; I believe you would keep to it, carry it out. But with me it would be different—it would be too much pain; I would far rather not see you at all. I love you too much," she added. A burning blush covered her face and throat as she met his eyes. Then it faded suddenly to so deathly a white that his old fear rushed back upon him. He had almost forgotten this fear in the lapse of time; but these terrible waves of color and of pallor, these overwhelming emotions that made her unable to stand—they brought back to him the old conviction, "She has no strength, she will not be able to endure it; she will die!" He took her in his arms and laid her down upon the cushions of a couch, made sick at heart as he did so by the lightness of her weight. Anything but that—that she should go from earth forever; anything but that!
As he bent over her, his heart full of his dread, she looked up; she saw his fear.
"Why—I am not dying," she said, reassuringly, smiling for an instant with almost a mother's sweetness; "it is nothing,—only the faintness that very often seizes me; it has been so all my life, it amounts to nothing. And now will you go? And promise me not to come back?"
"Margaret—that is too much."
"It is the only way; surely I have shown you—told you—in all its shame, my weakness." And again came the burning blush.
He had knelt down beside her. "Weakness!" He bowed his head upon her hand.
"Go," she repeated softly.
"I cannot go!"