Had she been looking, she would have seen a shadow cross his face—a very faint one, as the hope that it obscured had been faint also.
“Therefore,” he said, “I took advantage of you, and obtained from you a promise which I should never have asked. I want you to feel that I realize the wrong I did you in that, and ask your forgiveness for it.”
Slowly she lowered her hands and looked at him.
“And you can ask forgiveness of me?” she said.
“I humbly beg it—as on my knees.”
“Then what should be my attitude to you?”
“The proud and upright one of never having done me any conscious wrong.”
“But when I left you, rejected you, threw you off—”
“That was not done to me, but to the man you supposed me to be—the man who had been proved to you a scoundrel, by such proof as any one would have deemed you mad to doubt.”