But Claire feigned not to hear him. It was her caprice to remain among the throng. She moved toward the empty seats that she had indicated, he following. In all such minor matters she had already become the one who dictated and he the one who acquiesced.
The night, lying beyond them, was cool but beautifully calm. An immature moon hung in the heavens, and tinged the smooth sea with vapory silver, so that its outward spaces took an unspeakable softness, as though Nature were putting the idea of infinity in her very tenderest terms.
There was no music to-night, for some reason. The buzz of voices all about them soon produced for each a sense of privacy in the midst of publicity.
"You asked me to be your wife last night," Claire began, looking at him steadily a little while after they were both seated, and not using any special moderation of tone because certain of her own vantage in the prompt detection of a would-be listener. "Before I give you any final answer to that request—which I, of course, feel to be a great honor—it is only just and fair that I should make you know one or two facts of my past life, hitherto left untold."
This was not the language of passion. Perhaps he saw but too plainly its entire lack of fervor. Yet it seemed to point toward future consent, and he felt his bosom swell with hope.
"If it is anything you would rather leave untold," he said, with a magnanimity not wholly born of his deep love, "I have not the least desire to learn it."
Claire shook her head. "You must know it," she returned. "I prefer, I demand that you shall know it."
He felt too choked for any answer to leave him. If she imposed this condition, what was meant by its sweet imperiousness except the happy future truce for which he so strongly yearned? On some men might have flashed the dread suspicion that her words carried portent of an unpardonable fault, about to be confessed there and then. But Hollister's love clad its object in a sanctifying purity. Apart from this, moreover, his mind could give none of that grim welcome which certain dark fears easily gain elsewhere. The sun had long ago knit so many wholesome gleams into his being that he had no morbid hospitality for the entertainment of shadows.
"I want to tell you of how my father died," Claire went on, with her face so grave in every line that it won a new, unwonted beauty from the change. "And I want to tell you, also, of something that was done to me after his death, and of something that I myself did, not in personal revenge for my own sense of injury, but with the desire to assert my great respect for his loved memory, and to deal justice where I thought justice was deserved."
Then in somewhat faltering tones, because she had deliberately pressed backward among recollections so holy that she seemed to herself like one treading on a place filled with sacred tombs, she recounted the whole bitter story of her mother's avarice, of her father's ignoble burial, and of her own resultant flight. The tears stood in her eyes before she had ended, though they did not fall. As her voice ceased she saw that Hollister had grown very pale, and that his brows met in a stern frown. At the same moment his lip trembled; and as he leaned forward, took her hand into his own, pressed it once, briefly but forcibly, and then released it, she caught within his gaze a light of profound and unmistakable sympathy.