She winced as if he had struck her, and there was silence for a few moments before she spoke again, and then in a curiously changed voice, from her agony of heart.
“No, no,” she whispered at last; “it cannot be true. It is a strange dream. I cannot—I will not believe it.”
He strove again and again to speak, but no words would come. He tried to speak gently and ask her to forgive him, but in vain; and at last, even more brutally than before, he cried—
“I tell you it is true! If you knew all this, how could you come?”
There was a pause before Cornel spoke again, and then she drew herself up with an imperious gesture, and her words came firmly and full of defiance of the world.
“I came because I heard the man I loved was beaten down and wounded in the fight of life, and I said—‘What is it to me?—he loved me very dearly, and if he has been met by a strange temptation, and has fallen, my place is there. I will go to him, and remind him of the past, and point out again the forward way.’ Armstrong, that is why I have come.”
He groaned, and his voice was softened now, and half-choked by the agony and despair at his heart.
“Go back,” he said, “and forget me, Cornel; I am not the man you thought. I left you strong in my belief in self, ready for the fight, but your knight of truth and honour has turned out to be only a sorry pawn. I don’t ask you to forgive me: I only say, for your own sake, go, and forget that such a villain ever lived.”
“Then it is all true?” she said sternly.
“I don’t know what Joe Pacey has said,” he cried bitterly, as he gazed in the sweet womanly face before him, “but I make the only reparation that I can. I speak frankly, Cornel dear, and tell you that the worst he could say of me would not exceed the truth. Utterly unworthy—utterly base—I am not fit to touch your hand.”