"For God's sake, Eva," he cried, passionately, "listen to me one moment; grant that I may speak to you once more as Eva—not as the wife of Major Stanford. Let me hear the truth from your own lips. Eva, I have come here, to this horrible, horrible country, because I knew you were here. I came here to see you—to learn from you why you were false to me; why you spurned my love—the deepest and truest man ever felt for woman—and then to die."
He had thrown his cap, marked with the insignia of his rank and calling, into the grass at his feet; and the last rays of the sun, falling aslant on his rich, brown hair, made it bright and golden again, as Eva so well remembered it.
"False!" she repeated, slowly, as though her tongue refused to frame the accusation against him; "you were false—not I. Or was it not deceiving me—to tell me of your love; to promise faith and constancy to me while carrying on a flirtation—a correspondence with another woman?"
"You cannot believe that, Eva, any more than I could believe what Abby Hamilton told me—that you had left your aunt's house without telling me of it, purposely to avoid me and break every tie between us—till a package, containing all my letters to you, was handed me the day we marched from Fort Leavenworth."
"Those letters had been taken from my desk in my absence. But I had intrusted Abby with a note for you, when I was called to my sister's bedside. And, was it not Abby with whom you were seen riding?"
"Yes—to meet you at Mr. Redpath's farm; and I afterward sent you a note, through her, to which there came no answer save that package of my own letters."
"Why, then, did you go from me? Had you so little faith in me, so little love for me, that you could make no effort to see me? Was it so great a task to write me a few, short lines!"
"Then none of my letters have ever reached you? Oh, Eva, my darling—my lost one—can you not feel how my heart was wrung, how every drop of blood was turned into a scorching tear, searing my brain and eating my life away, when day after day passed, and no tidings came from you? I was on the point of deserting the command, of bringing ruin and disgrace on myself, when a brain fever put an end to my misery for the time, and I was carried to Fort Lyons, as they thought, only to be buried there. When I returned to Leavenworth on sick-leave, I was told you were gone, and your aunt took good care not to let me know where to find you. She had never liked me; but I could forgive her cruelty to me, did not your wan face and weary eyes tell me that my darling girl has not found the happiness I should have sacrificed my own to have purchased for her."
Eva bowed her face in her hands, and deep sobs seemed to rend her very soul, but no word passed her lips.
"Then your life has been made a wreck, as well as my own, Eva?" he continued, wildly, almost fiercely. "Is it right that it should be so: that we should be robbed of all that makes life sweet and desirable, by the wicked acts of others? Must we submit? Is it too late—"