“My dear, you are excited. Your generosity carries you away, and your divine, womanly pity and kindness. You speak without thinking. You will repent to-morrow.”
“That is not kind nor worthy of you,” said I. “I have thought about it for sixteen months, and the end of my thought has always been the same: I love Eugen Courvoisier, and if he had loved me I should have been a happy woman, and if—though I thought it too good to be true, you know—if he ever should tell me so, nothing in this world shall make me spoil our two lives by cowardice; I will hold to him against the whole world.”
“It is impossible, May,” he said, quietly, after a pause. “I wish you had never seen me.”
“It is only impossible if you make it so.”
“My sin found me out even here, in this quiet place, where I knew no one. It will find me out again. You—if ever you were married to me—would be pointed out as the wife of a man who had disgraced his honor in the blackest, foulest way. I must and will live it out alone.”
“You shall not live it out alone,” I said.
The idea that I could not stand by him—the fact that he was not prosperous, not stainless before the world—that mine would be no ordinary flourishing, meaningless marriage, in which “for better, for worse” signifies nothing but better, no worse—all this poured strength on strength into my heart, and seemed to warm it and do it good.
“I will tell you your duty,” said he. “Your duty is to go home and forget me. In due time some one else will find the loveliest and dearest being in the world—”
“Eugen! Eugen!” I cried, stabbed to the quick. “How can you? You can not love me, or you could not coldly turn me over to some other man, some abstraction—”
“Perhaps if he were not an abstraction I might not be able to do it,” he said, suddenly clasping me to him with a jealous movement. “No; I am sure I should not be able to do it. Nevertheless, while he yet is an abstraction, and because of that, I say, leave me!”