I had forgotten. The whole repulsive, rotten business came back to me. And, changed man that I had become in the last six months, I saw myself as I had been. I felt that she was looking at me, was reading the degrading confession in my telltale features.
“I will tell you the whole truth,” said I. “I did use your father's and your brother's debts to me as a means of getting to you. But, before God, Anita, I swear I was honest with you when I said to you I never hoped or wished to win you in that way!”
“I believe you,” she replied, and her tone and expression made my heart leap with indescribable joy.
Love is sometimes most unwise in his use of the reins he puts on passion. Instead of acting as impulse commanded, I said clumsily, “And I am very different to-day from what I was last spring.” It never occurred to me how she might interpret those words.
“I know,” she replied. She waited several seconds before adding: “I, too, have changed. I see that I was far more guilty than you. There is no excuse for me. I was badly brought up, as you used to say, but—”
“No—no,” I began to protest.
She cut me short with a sad: “You need not be polite and spare my feelings. Let's not talk of it. Let us go back to the object I had in coming for you to-day.”
“You owe me nothing,” I repeated. “Your brother and your father settled long ago. I lost nothing through them. And I've learned that if I had never known you, Roebuck and Langdon would still have attacked me.”
“What my uncle gave me has been transferred to you,” said she, woman fashion, not hearing what she did not care to heed. “I can't make you accept it; but there it is, and there it stays.”
“I can not take it,” said I. “If you insist on leaving it in my name, I shall simply return it to your uncle.”