She was hardly aware of it, but her candid tell-tale face betrayed more even than her words. It cut Robert Lyon to the heart.
"You suffered, and I never knew it."
"I never meant you to know."
"Why not?" He walked the room in great excitement. "I ought to have been told; it was cruel not to tell me. Suppose you had sunk under it; suppose you had died, or been driven to do what many a woman does for the sake of mere bread and a home—what your poor sister did—married. But I beg your pardon."
For Hilary had started up with her face all aglow.
"No," she cried; "no poverty would have sunk me as low as that. I might have starved, but I should never have married."
Robert Lyon looked at her, evidently uncomprehending, then said humbly, though rather formally,
"I beg your pardon once more. I had no right to allude to any thing of the kind."
Hilary replied not. It seemed as if now, close together, they were further apart than when the Indian seas rolled between them.
Mr. Lyon's brown cheek turned paler and paler; he pressed his lips hard together; they moved once or twice, but still he did not utter a word. At last, with a sort of desperate courage, and in a tone that Hilary had never heard from him in her life before, he said: