When she came, and sat down beside him with quiet dignity, she said, “Now Doctor, say what you wish, Charlie has told me much, but not all. Let us look into each other’s souls to-day.”
“I only want to ask you, dear,” he said tenderly, “just how far your friendship for this villain may have led you. I know you are innocent of any crime. I only want to know the measure of my own guilt.”
“You know, John,” she said, using his first name, as she had not for years, “he has always interested me from a boy, and in the darkest hour of my heart’s life, when I felt your love growing cold and slipping away from me, and my faith in all things fading, he attempted to make vulgar love to me. I repulsed him with scorn, and have since treated him with contempt. You know that I kissed him once when he was a boy. I have told you all. What do you propose to do?”
“What will I do, my darling?” he softly asked, taking her hand. “Begin anew from this moment to love and cherish, honour and protect you unto death. You are my wife. I took you a beautiful child, innocent of the world. If you have failed in the least, I have failed. If you have stumbled in the dark even in your thought, I will lift you up in my arms and soothe you as a mother would her babe. If you should fall into the bottomless pit, into the pit and down to the lowest depths of hell I would go, and lift you in the arms of my love. To break the tie that binds us is unthinkable. It has passed into the infinite. Not only are our souls one in a little boy’s grave, but there is something so absorbing, so interwoven with the hidden things of nature in our union that I defy all the fiends in perdition to break it. Love is eternal. And your love for me was the great fixed thing in my life like my faith in the living God!”
“Oh, John, you are breaking my heart now, when I think that I doubted your love! I could have brooked your anger, but this overwhelms me!”
“It has always been my character,” he gravely said.
“Then I have never known you until now,”—and in a moment she was sobbing on his breast, the years had rolled back, and they were in the sweet springtime of life again.