Will paused for her reply, and looking into her face, which she had turned towards him, he thought he read a confirmation of his hopes, but the first words she uttered wrung his heart with cruel disappointment.
“I cannot be your wife,” she said. “I mean it, Mr. Gordon, I cannot, and oh, it would be wicked not to tell you. Can I trust you? Will you keep my secret safe, as I have kept it almost six long years?”
There was some insufferable barrier between them, and William Gordon felt it, as trembling in every limb, he answered, “Whatever you intrust to me shall not be betrayed.”
“Then, listen,” she said, “and say if you will bid me marry you. I told you I was not what I seemed, and I am not. People, perhaps, call me young, but to myself I seem old, I have suffered so much and all my womanhood has been wasted, as it were, in tears. I told you once that before coming here I had given to another the love for which you sued, and I told you truly; but Mr. Gordon, there was more to tell; that other one, who loves me not, or who, if he does, has never manifested it to me by word or deed, is my own husband!”
“Oh, Marian, Marian, this indeed is death itself!” groaned Will, for though he had said there was no hope, it seemed to him now that he had never believed or realized it, as when he heard the dreadful words, “my own husband.”
“Do not despise me for deceiving you,” Marian continued. “If I had thought you could have seen aught to desire in me, a poor, humble girl, I might, perhaps, have warned you in time, though how could I tell you, a stranger, that I was an unloved wife?”
“Where is he—that man?” Will asked, for he could not say “your husband,” and his lip quivered with something akin to the pain one feels when he hears the cold earth rattling into the grave where he has buried his fondest pride.
Marian’s confession was a death-blow to all Will had dared to hope, and he asked for the husband more as a matter of form than because he really cared to know.
“Mr. Gordon,” said Marian, rising to her feet, and standing with her face turned fully toward him, “Must I tell you more? I thought I needed only to speak of a husband and you would guess the rest. Don’t you know me? Have we never met before?”
Wistfully, anxiously William gazed at her, scanning her features one by one, while a dim vision of something back in the past floated before him, but assumed no tangible form, and shaking his head, he answered: “Never, to my knowledge.”