"You did not wish to tell me?" she returned.
"I thought," he began, "that perhaps"—and stopped.
"You thought that he would write to me too," she said. "He—did not."
He did not speak, and she went on.
"When I returned to-night," she said, "papa was waiting for me. He had received a letter, too, and it told him—something he suspected before—something I had not suspected—something I could not know"—
Her voice broke, and when she began again there was a ring of desperate appeal to it.
"When I was a girl," she said, "when you knew me long ago, what was there of good in me that you should have remembered it through all that you have known of me since then?—there must have been something—something good or touching—something more than the goodness in yourself—that made you pitiful of me, and generous to me, and anxious for my sake. Tell me what it was."
"It was," he said, and his own voice was low and broken too, and his deep and sad eyes wore a look she had never seen before,—the look that, in the eyes of a woman, would have spoken of welling tears,—"it was—yourself."
"Myself!" she cried. "Oh, if it was myself, and there were goodness and truth, and what was worth remembering in me, why did it not save me from what I have been—and from what I am to-day? I do not think I meant to live my life so badly then; I was only careless and happy in a girlish way. I had so much faith and hope, and believed so much in all good things; and yet my life has all been wrong, and I seem to believe no more, and everything is lost to me; and since the days when I looked forward there is a gulf that I can never, never pass again."
She came nearer to him, and a sob broke from her.