“Sybilla!” he suddenly cried, pausing before her; “you do not know what you have done. You little think what my love has been, nor against how much it has struggled these five years. I have been true to you—ay, to the depth of my heart And you to me have been—not wholly true.”
Here he was answered by a burst of violent hysterical weeping. He longed to call for feminine assistance to this truly feminine ebullition, which he did not understand. But his pride forbade. So he tried to soothe his wife a little with softer words, though even these seemed somewhat foreign to his lips, after so many long-parted years.
“I did not mean to pain you thus deeply, Sybilla. I do not say that you have ceased to love me!”
Would that Sybilla had done as her first impulse taught her; have clung about him, crying “Never! never!” murmuring penitent words, as a tender wife may well do, and in such humility be the more exalted! But she had still the wayward spirit of a petted child. Fancying she saw her husband once more at her feet, she determined to keep him there. She wept on, refusing to be pacified.
At last Angus rose from her side, dignified and cold, his new, not his old self; the lover no more, but the quiet, half-indifferent husband. “I see we had better not talk of these things until you are more composed—perhaps, indeed, not at all. What is past—is past, and cannot be recalled.”
“Angus!” She looked up, frightened at his manner. She determined to conciliate him a little. “What do you want me to do? To say I am sorry? That I will—but,” with an air of coquettish command, “you must say so too.”
The jest was ill-timed; he was in too bitter a mood. “Excuse me—you exact too much, Mrs. Rothesay.”
“Mrs. Rothesay! Oh, call me Sybilla, or my heart will break!” cried the young creature, throwing herself into his arms. He did not repulse her; he even looked down upon her with a melting, half-reproachful tendernes.
“How happy we might have been! How different had been this coming home if you had only trusted me, and told me all from the beginning.”
“Have you told me? Is there nothing you have kept back from me these five years?”