“Why should you be grieved for me?” she retorted, looking at me sharply, and speaking in a tone of impatient anger. “I am happy as I am.”
“I don’t believe you,” I replied.
She again turned away her head.
“Mary,” I pursued, “can you doubt, that, spite of all, I have still a strong interest in the companion of my youth?”
She looked at me almost mournfully, but did not speak. At that moment I probably grew pale; for suddenly that chilly fit seized me again, and my forehead became clammy. That voice sounded again in my ear: “Speak of him!” were the words it uttered. Mary gazed on me with surprise, and yet I was assured that she had not heard that voice, so plain to me. She evidently mistook the nature of my visible emotion.
“O Master John!” she stammered, with tears gathering in her eyes, reverting again to that name of bygone times, “if you had loved me then—if you had consoled my true affection with one word of hope, one look of loving-kindness—if you had not spurned and crushed me, I should not have been what I am now.”
I was about to make some answer to this burst of unforgotten passion, when the voice came again: “Speak of him!”
“You have loved others since,” I remarked, with a coldness which seemed cruel to myself. “You love him now.” And I nodded my head toward the door by which the man had disappeared.
“Do I?” she said, with a bitter smile. “Perhaps; who knows?”
“And yet no good can come to you from a connection with that man,” I pursued.