"You shouldn't say that," she replied, a pink spot appearing on either cheek. "It would be a great deal worse to deceive some one more ignorant and much weaker than I. I have had many opportunities, denied to a large number of young women. I ought to know better how to evade the evils of falsehood and deceit."
Reynolds did not speak for some minutes. A swell of the fragrant south wind came through the window, and the first mocking bird of the season was singing in a magnolia tree at the further angle of the house. The drowsy charm of spring's earliest stirrings hovered in the sky, the air, the far-spreading fields and the shimmering glimpses of water. Something like the warning of a distant, scarcely audible voice was ringing in his ears. Below his dreamy happiness he could feel the beginnings of a vague uneasiness.
"I know, I know," he presently said, and he did not realize the almost brutal directness of his words, "yours was a bitter and burning disappointment. You deserved every thing that you hoped for, nothing that you received."
Her face grew pale and flushed at once, so that the spot on either cheek shone like carmine on a milk-white ground. She looked helplessly at him with her lips slightly parted and her eyes beaming, as if through a haze.
"Oh, I have pained you!" he exclaimed, with such a penitent and sorrowful intonation that she made a weak effort to smile. "Forgive me," he went on rapidly. "I seem in an unfortunate groove to-day. You know I would not wound you for the world."
"It relieves me that you have said what you have," she replied, after a pause, "for it tells me that you know my past. I wanted you to know, and I could not tell you. I did not see how I ever could begin or how——"
"Let it pass, let it go by like the wind," he murmured; "the future is all ours, we will make it as pure and lovely as the sky yonder, won't we, love?"
She crossed her hands in her lap and smiled on him with tears in her eyes. How grand and beautiful he appeared to her, reclining there, with his stalwart limbs outstretched and his manly face beaming with love. It was a quick, uncontrollable impulse that caused her to say, with a tender tremor in her voice:
"I wanted you to know that I loved him and that if he were alive now I would still love him, notwithstanding all that has happened."
"Yes, yes, that is all right, all right," he quickly responded. "It is sweet of you to feel so; but he is—he is not alive, you know, and—"