She did not stir, she did not speak. The tears brimmed over and rolled down her cheeks, but she kept her place in silence.
"Will you not come to me?" he pleaded, and she answered then, drearily:
"I cannot."
"You cannot! Oh, Laurel, do not say so!" he cried. "What is to hinder you from coming back to my heart? What can stand between us?"
"Your own words," she answered, brushing the tears away, and gazing at him with eyes full of somber misery and pain.
He was full of wonder and perplexity.
"I cannot understand you," he said. "I would give the world to have you back again, Laurel. I love you with the most faithful love the world ever knew. I shall never cease to love you!"
"Yet once you said—surely you remember it, St. Leon?—that you could never again love a woman who had deceived you. Once fallen from its pedestal, the broken idol could never be restored again."
The words came back to his memory—the words he had spoken before he knew—the words that were all that stood between them now.
He looked at her in anguish. He would have given anything if only he had never made that vain boast—how vain he had never known till now.