"Don't get up yet," he said, earnestly, and even tenderly; "you're not equal to it. Don't think of leaving me—you must have confidence in me. Why didn't you trust me long ago?—trust me altogether? Fear nothing while I am near you."
So he continued speaking, until my recollection had quite returned.
"Why, darling, will you not trust me? Can you be surprised at my being wounded by your reserve? How have I deserved it? Forget the pain of this discovery, and remember only that against all the world, to the last hour of my life, with my last thought, the last drop of my blood, I am your defender."
He kissed my hands passionately; he drew me towards him, and kissed my lips. He murmured caresses and vows of unalterable love—nothing could be more tender and impassioned. I was relieved by a passionate burst of tears.
"It's over now," he said—"it's all over; you'll forgive me, won't you? I have more to forgive, darling, than you—the hardest of all things to forgive in one whom we idolise—a want of confidence in us. You ought to have told me all this before."
I told him, as well as I could between my sobs, that there was no need to tell any one of a madness which had nothing to do with waking thoughts or wishes, and was simply the extravagance of delirium—that I was then actually in fever, had been at the point of death, and that Mr. Carmel knew everything about it.
"Well, darling," he said, "you must trouble your mind no more. Of course you are not accountable for it. If people in brain fever were not carefully watched and restrained, a day would not pass without some tragedy. But what care I, Ethel, if it had been a real crime of passion? Nothing. Do you fancy it would or could, for an instant, have shaken my desperate love for you? Don't you remember Moore's lines:
| 'I ask not, I care not, if guilt's in thy heart; |
| I but know that thou lov'st me, whatever thou art.' |
"That is my feeling, fixed as adamant; never suspect me. I can't I never can, tell you how I felt your suspicion of my love; how cruel I thought it. What had I done to deserve it? There, darling, take this—it is yours." He kissed the little photograph, he placed it in my hand, he kissed me again fervently. "Look here, Ethel, I came all this way, ever so much out of my way, to see you. I made an excuse of paying the vicar a visit on business—my real business was to see you. I must be this evening at Wrexham, but I shall be here again to-morrow, as early as possible. I am a mere slave at present, and business hurries me from point to point; but cost what it may, I shall be with you some time in the afternoon to-morrow."
"To stay?" I asked.