She was tender, but very timid, scarcely daring to offer the least attention, lest it be repulsed. There rang in her memory always some words he had uttered long ago:
“Paulina, you have put upon me an unmerited disgrace and a cruel wrong. I will never forgive you as long as I live!”
Again, in the garden at Idlewild, three years ago, he had said to her most bitterly:
“Do not think I have come to forgive you!”
She had never forgotten the bitterness of those words. They dazed her, too, for in her own opinion she had been the only wronged one, he the transgressor.
He was going out of life now, and she read in his silence that he would keep his word, that for the grievance he cherished he would not grant forgiveness.
Neither would he plead with her for pardon for the wrong that he had done.
It was a cruel position for both, and she felt that he only endured her presence for cold pity’s sake, while secretly wishing her away.
“God help me. I can not bear to leave him!” she thought, despairingly.
The next morning the travelers from Florida arrived.