"I don't think I ever meant you to."
She waited patiently for him to add to his strange words and was slow to realize that he couldn't.
"That would have been cruel," she said at last.
"It would have been cruel either way. However, it is all done with now."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," she said, finding that speech had failed him again.
"I don't know whether I can tell you."
Ought he to tell her? A harrowing doubt arose. She knew that there had been some grave reason for his going away. But what the hidden cause had been, hers was not a nature that would ask. She only knew that if speech and bearing meant anything, he was deeply in love with her, and yet for some unfathomable reason he had shirked the issue.
And now he had returned after these long months, which to her as well as to himself had been a time of more than bitterness, there was still this shadow between them. Yet it surely belonged to the past. There was no barrier between them now, except the memory of a secret which somehow he could not believe was vital.
In her immense desire to serve him she was ready to give all that he might ask. But there was still a reservation in his mind. In the sudden revelation, as it seemed to him, of the divine clemency, he was overwhelmed by a desire to confess all.
There may have been no need to do so, yet that was not a question to ask. She was his, he knew it; she would not be less, she would be doubly his, if she learned the circumstances of his life. Besides, so high was the revulsion of feeling now upon him that it seemed the course of honor. And was it not her right to know all concerning him before he demanded so great a sacrifice?