“Agatha!”
“No—I'll not hear you. See what you have done—how you have made me disgrace myself” and she almost sobbed.—“Never in my life was I in a passion before.”
“Is it my fault then?” said he, mournfully.
“Yes, yours. It is you who stir up all these bad feelings in me.. I was a good girl, a happy girl, before you married me.”
“Was it so? Then you shall be held blameless. Poor child—poor child!”
His unutterable regret, his entire prostration, stung her to the heart, and silenced her for the moment; but speedily she burst out again:
“You call me a child—so perhaps I am, in years; but you should have thought of that before. You married me, and made me a woman. You took away my gay childish heart, and yet in all humiliating things you still treat me like a child.”
“Do I?” He answered mechanically, out of thoughts that lay deep down, far below the surface of his wife's bitter words. These last awoke in him not one ray of anger—not even when at last, in a fit of uncontrollable petulance, she tore his hand from before his eyes, bidding him look at her—if he dared.
“Yes, I dare.” And the look she courted, arose steady, sorrowful, like that of a man who turns his eyes upward, hopeless yet faithful, out of a wrecked ship. “Whatever has been, or may come, God knows that, from the first, I did love you, Agatha.”
Wherefore had he used the word “did!” Why could she not smother down the unwonted pang, the new craving? Or rather, why could she not throw herself in his arms and cry out, “Do you love me—do you love me now?” Pride—pride only—the restless wild nature upon which his reserve fell like water upon fire, without the blending spirit of conscious love which often makes two opposite temperaments result in closest union.