"Where there is mystery there must be guilt!" he fiercely thought. "Nothing under heaven can make it right for a wife to have a secret from her husband. And she knew it, and concealed it before she married me, and means to deceive me until the end. In a week her name and that of this low-bred ruffian will be bandied together throughout the country."
And then, like a man mad indeed, he tore up and down the apartment, his hands clinched, his face ghastly, his eyes bloodshot. And then all doubts and fears were swept away, and love rushed back in an impetuous torrent, and he knew that to lose her were ten thousand times worse than death.
"My beautiful! my own! my darling! May Heaven pity us both! for be your secret what it may, I can not lose you—I can not! Life without you were tenfold worse than the bitterest death! My own poor girl! I know she suffers, too, for this miserable secret, this sin of others—for such it must be. She looked up in my face with truthful, innocent eyes, and told me she never saw this man until she met him that day in the library, and I know she spoke the truth! My love, my wife! You asked me to trust you, and I thrust you aside! I spoke and acted like a brute! I will trust you! I will wait! I will never doubt you again, my own beloved bride!"
And then, in a paroxysm of love and remorse, the young husband strode out of the library and upstairs to his wife's room. He found her alone, sitting by the window, in her loose white morning-robe, a book lying idly on her knee, herself whiter than the dress she wore. She was not reading, the dark eyes looked straight before them with an unutterable pathos that it wrung his heart to see.
"My love! my life!" He had her in his strong arms, strained to his breast as if he never meant to let her go. "My own dear Harrie! Can you ever forgive me for the brutal words I used—for the brutal way I acted?"
"My Everard! my beloved husband! My darling! my darling! You are not—you will not be angry with your poor little Harrie?"
"I could not, my life! What is the world worth to us if we can not love and trust? I do love you, God alone knows how well! I will trust you, though all the world should rise up against you!"
"Thank Heaven! thank Heaven! Everard, dearest, I can not tell you—I can not—how miserable I have been! If I lost your love I should die! Trust me, my husband—trust me! Love me! I have no one left in the wide world but you!"
She broke down in a wild storm of womanly weeping. He held her in silence—the hysterics did her good. He only knew that he loved her with a passionate, consuming love, and not ten million secrets could keep them apart.
Presently she raised her head and looked at him.