“Except marry me?”
“Even so.”
“Well, well; perhaps you are right. I, a poor clerk, with neither health, nor income, nor prospects—”
He stopped, and no wonder, before the rebuke of my sister's eyes.
“Francis, you know you are not speaking as you think. You know I have given you my true reason, and my only one. If we were engaged still, in outward form, I should say exactly the same, for a broken promise is less wicked than a deceitful vow. One should not marry—one ought not—when one has ceased to love.”
Francis made her no reply. The sense of all he had lost, now that he had lost it, seemed to come upon him heavily, overwhelmingly. His first words were the saddest and humblest I ever heard from Francis Charteris.
“I deserve it all. No wonder you will never forgive me.”
Penelope smiled—a very mournful smile.
“At your old habit of jumping at conclusions! Indeed, I have forgiven you long ago. Perhaps, had I been less faulty myself, I might have had more influence over you. But all was as it was to be, I suppose and it is over now. Do not let us revive it.”
She sighed, and sat silent for a few moments, looking absently across the moorland; then with a sort of wistful tenderness—the tenderness which, one clearly saw, for ever prevents and excludes love—on Francis.