"For you," he said, speaking thickly. "They are the only two the clematis had. If it had ten thousand they would have been for you."
Deleah kept her eyes upon the flowers. She felt that she could not touch them. "You are very kind," she said.
"You would say as much as that to any stranger in the street who had kicked a stone out of your path, and I—I—." He was stammering curiously in his thickened voice. It seemed that the words he wanted to speak would not come. "And I—after all that I suffer—only kind?" he got out at last.
With something of the expression of a trapped creature in her eyes, Deleah looked past him to the door. He turned instantly, and shut it, and came back to his place opposite her at the table.
"Your sister is married to Mr. Boult, to-day," he said. "At one time you could not marry me because of your sister. That impediment's gone. Another time, you had some other excuse. Again another. Come, what excuse have you to-day?" He leant across the table to bring his face closer to hers. "You don't intend to marry me, do you?"
She gazed at him with fear in her eyes, but did not speak. "You let me live beside you, set my heart on you, till there was nothing else on earth or heaven for me but you. You let me slave to serve a man I hated as a means of getting you. You let me get ready my house—every brick in it, every pound of paint laid on it, for you. You—"
"Mr. Gibbon, do wait! I think you are saying too much. I never deceived you. I never said I would marry you. I tried to make you understand."
"Listen! Have you always hated me? When you took my flowers and fruit—all the presents I lavished on you—tell me, did you hate me then?"
"Certainly I did not. I thought you very kind and generous."
"Do you hate me now?" When she told him 'no' he stretched out a shaking hand to her across the table. "Then—?"