“I am very glad I fell, then,” said I, rather impatiently, while I threw on my hood and shawl, preparatory to going home.
“Hadn’t you better call an omnibus for her?” asked Dell of her husband, who was putting on his overshoes.
“I am going round with her myself,” he answered. “I have a patient on the way,” and he hurried from the room ere she could say anything further.
It was a beautiful moonlight night, and as I took his arm I recalled the time when once before we had walked thus together. I think he remembered it too, for he asked me “if I ever visited Pine District?”
“Not often,” I replied; and he continued to say, that “notwithstanding that it was little more than a year and a half since he first saw me there, it seemed to him an age,” adding; “and it is not strange neither, for I have passed through many trials since then.”
To this I made no reply, and ere long he proceeded to speak further of himself, and of his disappointment, first with regard to his business, and next with regard to his domestic relations, which he gave me to understand were not particularly happy. Very delicately and carefully he handled the latter subject, speaking not one half so harshly of Dell as she had spoken of him. Still I felt that he had no right thus to speak to me, and so I told him.
“I know it, Rose,” he returned. “I know it all; but for this once you must hear me, and I will never trouble you again. I committed a great error in marrying one, while my heart belonged to another—stay,” he continued, as I was about to interrupt him. “You must hear me out. It is not of my love for that other that I would speak; but, Rose, I would know how far I have wronged you. Did you love me, and had I asked you to share my home, when at a suitable age, would you have done so?”
He was very pale, and the arm on which my hand was resting, trembled violently, but grew still when he heard my answer, which was, “I did love you, but ’twas a childish love and quickly passed away. And were you now free as you once were, I could be to you nothing save a friend.”
There was a mixture of disappointment and pleasure on his face; but he replied, “I am glad that it is so, and shall now feel happier, for the hardest part of all was the thought that possibly you, too, might suffer.”
“Not at all,” I answered, adding, “it would be foolish to break my heart for one man, when there are so many in the world.”