"I have brought you out here to have an earnest talk with you," he said, huskily. "The time has now come when we should try to understand each other. Don't you think so?"
She looked up at him in affright. Was he going to send her away? Was he growing tired of the position in which they stood to each other?
"Yes," she answered; and it caused her a desperate effort to utter the word.
"I am going to take you into my confidence, Ida," he said. "Come under this swinging lamp. I want to read you this letter."
She followed him with faltering steps.
To her great surprise she saw him take from his breast-pocket the very letter which Miss Fernly had sent, and which she had slipped into his desk. But she dared not tell him that she knew what the letter contained.
"I will preface my remarks by saying that the news of your illness has spread far and wide, and that the report was repeated in different forms. Instead of saying that you were ill, some of the papers had it that my young wife had died. Miss Fernly, whom you have good reason to remember, thereupon wrote me this letter."
She listened, her face white as death. He handed her the letter. Every word made a new wound in her heart. How well she remembered each and every sentence! Slowly she read the letter through. Then she folded and handed it back to him.
"Ida," he said, "I have been trying to forget the past as no man has ever tried before. All my time has been given up to it. I have drawn a curtain over my past, and shut out its brightness, its hopes, from my life. I have pulled the roots of a beautiful budding plant from my soul, and bid it grow there no more. I have tried to do my duty by you, and now I have come to this conclusion—you must help me bury the past. I have brought you out here to ask you to be my wife in fact as well as in name."
He did not tell her that during her illness he had discovered the secret of her life—that she loved him with all the passionate love of her nature, and that his indifference was eating out her life.