And the boy whose treble voice sounded now and again from the next room—the child from whose lightest contact she had shrank with jealous abhorrence—that child was of her kindred, no matter how basely born. He was all that was left to her of the brother she had loved, and it was not for her to shrink from him.
CHAPTER XXIX.
“’TIS NOT THE SAME NOW, NEVER MORE CAN BE.”
Vansittart was the first to break that agony of silence.
“Does this mean the end of love?” he asked. “Is all over and done with between you and me? Is love only a dream that we have dreamed?”
“Yes; it is a dream,” she answered, looking at him with tearless eyes, which had more misery in them than all the tears he had ever seen in the eyes of women. “It is something perhaps to have believed one’s self happy for two blessed years. You have been so good to me—so good to poor Peggy. She loved you almost as much as I did. You have been all goodness,—and you did not know that he was my brother. Yet, yet, when you killed him you must have known that some heart would be broken. No, I can never forget how good you have been—or how dear. Don’t think that I can change in an hour from love to hate. No, no; that cannot be. To my dying day I must love you—but I cannot live with the man who killed my brother. I can never be your wife again. That is all over. We must be strangers on this side of the grave.”
“A hard sentence, Eve; it could not be harder if I were a deliberate murderer. And yet perhaps it is no more than I deserve—perhaps even the gallows would be no more than my desert——”
“The gallows! Oh, God, could they kill you because——?”
The words died in her throat, choked by the agony of a great fear.
“But no one knows—no one will ever know,” she cried. “She will never tell”—pointing to the door. “She loves you too dearly.”