Marion did not answer.
“You know I love you. I—know you once loved me,” he went on, losing his head, as a consequence of her indifference. “Perhaps you resented my treating you as I did. Perhaps I didn’t do right, going off that way, without a word; but I thought it better so. You see—my mother,—and I,—Marion Shaw!”—he seized her hand, grasping it in both his own—“will you marry me?”
Marion withdrew her hand.
It was cool, and she felt like a spectator at stage theatricals which did not concern her.
“Marion, you did love me, you can’t deny it!” he said. “What is the trouble?”
“I’m sorry you have brought this subject up to-night,” she said, gently. “It had much better have remained dead and buried.”
“Marion Shaw, you shall not evade me so,” retorted Burnham, led on by her steady refusal to respond to his passion. “You did love me—I was sure of it—or else, you are the basest of coquettes, and were playing with me. And now you are tired of me!”
“As you were of me!” she blazed out, now roused into speech. “Listen, since you dare address me as you do. I did not love you. You thought I did. I thought I did. When you found it convenient for some reason, I neither know nor care what, to leave me without a word, I found, for the first time, that I was only in love with being in love. No,—wait until I am through. Ten years ago I became engaged to the bravest and best and truest man that ever lived.” Marion’s voice broke, but she went on. “He died and I kept on loving his memory, loving him wherever he might be. When I met you, the striking resemblance you bore to him smote me like an electric shock. You seemed good and noble like him, and under the glamour of your constant presence and evident fancy for me, I allowed myself to drift into a sentimental feeling for you. I now see what that feeling was. It was only a love of being in love; and you happened to be the one man I have met so far, and I hope the only one I shall ever meet, capable of calling that feeling out. You have compelled me to speak plainly. I hope you are satisfied. This is our gate. Miss Shepard has retired, but she will be glad to see you at the office in the morning. Good-night.” And Marion left him standing rooted to the ground where she left him.
For a few days Burnham felt himself a badly used man. He had loved and his love had been trampled on, he said to himself.
He went back to Lowell the next day, promising to write Villard; and a week after, when he had settled down at home again with his dainty and querulous mother, he went calmly over the ground of his defeat.