“Will you tell me what it is and how I can help you?” He longed to take her in his arms like a little child and comfort her, but he might not. She was another’s. And perhaps that other had been cruel to her! His clenched fists showed how terrible was the thought. But still the bowed figure in its piteous black sobbed and did not reply anything except, “Oh, I am so unhappy! I cannot bear it any longer.”
“Is—your—your—husband unkind to you?” The words tore themselves from his tense lips as though they were beyond his control.
“Oh, no,—not exactly unkind—that is—he was not very nice before he went away,” wailed out a sad voice from behind the linen cambric and lace, “and he went away without a kind word, and left me hardly any money—and he hasn’t sent me any word since—and fa-father won’t have anything to do with me any more—but—but—it’s not that I mind, David. I don’t think about those things at all. I’m so unhappy about you. I feel you do not forgive me, and I cannot stand it any longer. I have made a fearful mistake, and you are angry with me—I think about it at night”—the voice was growing lower now, and the sentences broken by sobs that told better than words what distress the sufferer would convey.
“I have been so wicked—and you were so good and kind—and now you will never forgive me—I think it will kill me to keep on thinking about it—” her voice trailed off in tears again.
David white with anguish sprang to his feet.
“Oh, Kate,” he cried, “my darling! Don’t talk that way. You know I forgive you. Look up and tell me you know I forgive you.”
Almost she smiled her triumph beneath her sobs in the little lace border, but she looked up with real tears on her face. Even her tears obeyed her will. She was a good actress, also she knew her power over David.
“Oh, David,” she cried, standing up and clasping her hands beseechingly, “can it be true? Do you really forgive me? Tell me again.”
She came and stood temptingly near to the stern, suffering man wild with the tumult that raged within him. Her golden head was near his shoulder where it had rested more than once in time gone by. He looked down at her from his suffering height his arms folded tightly and said, as though taking oath before a court of justice:
“I do.”