“Well,” with a timid little laugh, “it may be a strange enough statement; but of what consequence is that, if it is true?”
“If it is true. You are already retiring from it.”
“Oh, not for a moment! You should not say that. I have not deserved it. I have spoken the truth; why do you doubt it?”
Her reply was prompt.
“Simply because you didn’t speak it earlier!”
“Oh!” It wasn’t a groan, exactly, but it was an intelligible enough expression of the fact that he saw the point and recognized that there was reason in it.
“You have seemed to conceal nothing from me that I ought to know concerning yourself, and you were not privileged to keep back such a thing as this from me a moment after—after—well, after you had determined to pay your court to me.”
“Its true, it’s true, I know it! But there were circumstances—in—in the way—circumstances which—”
She waved the circumstances aside.
“Well, you see,” he said, pleadingly, “you seemed so bent on our traveling the proud path of honest labor and honorable poverty, that I was terrified—that is, I was afraid—of—of—well, you know how you talked.”