“And yet they should not have touched my faith in you; the child brought up in my father’s house, the child not only loved, but esteemed and honored by my father, and not by him only, but by all his friends and neighbors! No, Lilith, even those surrounding circumstances, though you could not explain them, should never have touched my faith in you! would never have done so, but that I was mad—mad with jealousy! Yes, I confess it. Lilith, can you forgive me for that causeless, injurious jealousy?” he pleaded, bending over her.
“Oh, Tudor! If there were anything to forgive, it was forgiven on that very night in which we parted.”
“Ah! why did you go, my Lilith? Why did you let words of frenzy drive you away? Could not you, my gentle child, have been patient with a madman for a little while? Why act upon reproaches that you knew to be undeserved and altogether unreasonable?”
“I knew they were undeserved, but I thought they were very reasonable, under all the circumstances. Oh, Tudor, it was not your reproaches, not your anger, that drove me away from you! I could have borne them and waited for time to vindicate me, to justify me in your sight. No, Tudor, it was not anger nor reproach that drove me away.”
“What was it, then?”
“I told you; but you have forgotten it, or misunderstood. Tudor, I had to go. I had no choice. You told me that you did not love me; that you had never loved me, and said that you would go away and never come back while I stayed in the house. But you ‘never loved’ me. These were the words that drove me from you.”
“The words of a maniac!”
“Did you find my farewell letter, left on your bureau, Tudor?”
“Yes—I did.”
“Do you remember its contents?”