"So I told myself."
"And good has come? I have heard that figs do grow on thistles."
"Good has come. But, I think, in spite of me, not through me."
"But now that you see," she said, turning her eyes to mine with appeal in them, and something more, I thought, "you will—you will not go on?"
"I don't know. Is there such a thing as remorse without regret?" And then my self-control went and I let her see what I had commanded myself to keep hid: "I only know clearly one thing, Elizabeth—only one thing matters. You are the whole world to me. You and I could—what could we not do together!"
Her color slowly rose, slowly vanished. "Was that what you came to tell me?" she asked.
"Yes," I answered, not flinching.
"That is the climax of your moralizings?"
"Yes," I answered. "And of my cowardice."
A little icy smile just changed the curve of her lips. "When I was a girl, you won my love—or took it when I gave it to you, if you prefer. And then—you threw it away. For an ambition you weren't brave enough to pursue honorably, you broke my heart."