“You, and you only, can bring me joy and peace.”
She caressed his hair with a tender, protective hand. “My Matthew!” she murmured.
“And you, Eleanor,” he faltered, tremulously; “I shall not make you unhappy?”
“I shall be happier than I have ever been,” and her arms stole round him again in simple trust.
“Ah, I was forgetting. Life owes you happiness, too. If I dared to think I could bring you forgetfulness of the past!”
She shuddered. Her arms unlaced themselves of their own accord. She dropped into a chair before the table and laid them across the moulding-dish, and buried her head in her hands. He stood by helpless, torn by emotions, waiting till the flood of bitter memories should have spent itself, watching her shoulders quivering, and the sunlight lying on her hair like a consecration.
“Oh, Douglas!” she was moaning. “Did I do you wrong? Did I do you wrong? But I meant the best; I always meant the best, God knows. And you cannot chide me now you are dead and cold, and it is all so long ago.”
He shivered nervously. Truly women were incomprehensible, he thought. No man could follow the leaps and turns of their emotions. They were a higher, more ethereal order of being. But he reverenced her for her loyalty to the unworthy dead, her punctilious self-torture, even while he envied the man who had been privileged to call her “wife.”
He touched her hair reverently—there where the sunshine rested.
“Don’t cry, dear Eleanor.”