Her heart was full and her nerves overstrained already. She could not speak, but she bowed her head on the rail of the balustrade, hiding her face against her arm, and strove hard to check the rising sobs.
"Miss Mayhew," he continued, in low, pleading tones, "in all my life I never condemned myself so bitterly as I have for my treatment of you. I can only appeal to your generosity. I NEED your forgiveness," and he waited for her answer.
But she could not answer. It seemed as if she could not maintain even her partial self-control a moment longer. Her heart forgave him, however, and she wished him to know it, so without lifting her head she held out her hand in the place of the words she could not trust herself to utter. He seized it eagerly, and it so trembled and throbbed in his grasp that it made him think of a wounded bird that he once had captured.
"I take your hand, Miss Mayhew," he said earnestly, "not as a sign of truce between us, but as a token of forgiveness, and the pledge of reconciliation and friendship. Your brave truth-telling to-night has atoned for your past. Please give me a chance at least to try to atone for mine."
His only reply was a faint pressure from her hand and then she sped up the stairway. He did not see her again till she came down to breakfast the following morning, when she treated him with a quiet, distant, well-bred courtesy that did not suggest the sobbing girl who had fled from him the evening before, much less the despairing, desperate woman who had given him the drug with which she had intended to end her existence. They who see conventional surfaces only know but little of life.
Truthful as she was trying to be, she was puzzling him more than ever, although he was giving a great deal of thought to the problem.
Chapter XLIII. A "Heavenly Mystery."
While Ida's manner at the breakfast-table was quiet and self-possessed, she still maintained the same distant bearing which had been characteristic the evening before. It was evident to Van Berg, however, that pride, wounded vanity, and resentment were no longer the motives for the seclusion in which she sought to remain, even while under the eyes of others. It was the natural shrinking of one who would hide weakness, trouble, and imperfection. It was the bearing of one who had been deeply humiliated, and who was conscious of a partial estrangement towards those having a knowledge of this humiliation. Thus far he could understand her; and in the proportion she was depressed and withdrew from social recognition and encouragement, his sympathy and respect were drawn out towards her.
"She is not trivial and superficial, as I supposed," he thought twenty times that morning. "There is not a sudden calm after the storm that has been raging, as would be the case were she in character like a shallow pool. Her manner now proves daily the largeness of the nature that has been so deeply moved, and which, like the agitated sea, regains its peace but slowly;" and the sagacious Van Berg, whose imagination was not under very good control began to react into the other extreme, and query whether Ida Mayhew's moral nature, now that it was aroused, was not her chief characteristic.
Meanwhile, the subject of his many-colored speculations had driven away in the low basket phaeton, having first explained briefly to her mother that she intended to spend the morning again with the two old people she had visited the previous day.