“How amazing!” she said.
He turned for the first time and looked down into her upraised face. “I thought you would never come back,” he said, and in voice and look she gauged the misery to which he gave no words. “I never had any hope.”
The tears sprang to her eyes. She clung to him voicelessly for a few seconds. Then: “And I thought you were dead!” she whispered. “That was why I didn’t dare to ask!”
He took her shoulders between his hands, holding her slightly from him. “Frances, listen!” he said. “I’m going to be fair to you. I won’t take you—like this. You don’t know what I am—a hard man, melancholy, bitter, the son of a murderer, not fit for any woman to love, much less marry. I am going away—as I said. Maggie and Oliver will run the farm. My mother will stay on with them. The girls will either stay or find their own way in the world. I’ve come to see that it isn’t for me to hold them in any longer. Maggie made me realize that—you too. But I always had the thought of Nan before me. That was what made me so hard with them. But I’m going away now. And you will go back to the Bishop. He wants you. I believe he will be decent to you. I have heard from him about you. Some day—some day—you will find a man worthy of you. Not me—not Montague—someone you can give your whole heart to—and trust.”
He paused a moment. His face was quivering. She saw him again—a gladiator fighting his desperate battle, conquered yet still not beaten to earth, holding her from him, defying the irresistible, ready to make the last and utmost sacrifice, that she might suffer no hurt.
And then, with a gesture of renunciation, he dropped his hands from her and let her go.
“That’s all,” he said, and there was a tremor in his voice which thrilled her through and through. “You are free. I am going. Good-bye!”
He turned away from her with the words. He would have gone. But in that instant Frances spoke—in the language that comes from the heart and speaks to the heart alone.
“I am not free,” she said, “and you can never make me so. I am yours—as you are mine—for ever and ever. Nothing can ever alter that, because—God made it so.”
Then, as he stood motionless, she went close to him, twining her arm in his, drawing him to her.