“I had it from his own lips; he sitting on one side of you and I upon the other. I so forgot myself as to charge him with loving you, and he did not deny it, but confessed as pretty a piece of romance as I ever read, except that, according to his story, it was a one-sided affair, confined wholly to himself. You never dreamed of it, he said.”
“Never, no never,” Katy said, panting for her breath, and remembering suddenly many things which confirmed what she had heard.
“Poor Morris, how my thoughtlessness must have wounded him,” she murmured, and then all the pent-up passion in Wilford’s heart burst out in an impetuous storm.
He did not charge his wife directly with returning Morris’s love; but he said she was sorry she had not known it earlier, asking her pointedly if it were not so, and pressing her for an answer, until the bewildered creature cried out,
“Oh, I don’t know. I never thought of it before.”
“But you can think of it now,” Wilford continued, his cold, icy tone making Katy shiver, as, more to herself than to him, she whispered,
“A life at Linwood with him would be perfect rest, compared with this.”
Wilford had goaded her on to say that which roused him to a pitch of frenzy.
“You can go to your rest at Linwood as soon as you like, and I will go my way,” he whispered hoarsely, and believing himself the most injured man in existence, he left the house, and Katy heard his step, as it went furiously down the steps. For a time she sat stunned with what she had heard, and then there came stealing into her heart a glad feeling that Morris deemed her worthy of his love when she had so often feared the contrary. And in this she was not faithless to Wilford. She could pray with just as pure a heart as before, and she did pray, thanking God for the love of this good man, but asking that long ere this he might have learned to be content without her. Never once did the thought “It might have been,” intrude itself upon her, nor did she send one regret after the life she had missed. She seemed to rise above all that, and Wilford, had he read her heart, would have found no evil there.
“Poor Morris,” she kept repeating, while little throbs of pleasure went dancing through her veins, and the world was not one half so dreary for knowing he had loved her. Towards Wilford, too, her heart went out in a fresh gush of tenderness, for she knew how one of his jealous nature must have suffered.