She was silent for a long moment, gazing straight before her with a strange, wild excitement growing in her heart. At last, with one final effort at self-mastery, she deliberately lifted her eyes to his. "About you?" she said faintly.
"About you and me," he answered.
She made an ineffectual struggle, half-rose, looked this way and that, as if for flight, then sank back again into her place, in absolute surrender.
"Say it," she whispered, almost inaudibly.
"Wynifred," he said, his voice taking from his emotion a thrill which she felt in the innermost recesses of her heart. "I have a confession to make to you—a confession of fraud. Pity me. Perhaps the confession will deprive me of your friendship for ever; but I must speak. There is something in my possession which belongs to you—it has been yours for nearly a year. You ought to have had it long ago. I have kept it back from you all these months. Do you think you can forgive me?"
She gazed at him uncomprehending.
"Something of mine? A letter?" said she.
"No, not a letter." It was exquisite, this interview; he could have prayed to prolong it for weeks. He held her attention now, as well as her hands; he felt inclined to be deliberate. "It is worth nothing, or very little, this thing in question," he went on. "You may not care for it—you may utterly decline to have it—you may tell me that it is worthless in your eyes, and throw it back to me in scorn. But, since it is yours, I feel that I must just lay it before you, to take or leave. It has been yours for so long, that I think that very fact has made it rather less good-for-nothing, and, Wynifred, it has in it the capacity for growth. If you would take it and keep it, there is no telling what you might make of it."
"I do not understand," cried Wynifred.
"You do not understand why your own was not given to you before?" he asked, softly. "That is the shameful part of the story. I kept it back only for mean and contemptible reasons; because I was afraid to give it absolutely into your keeping, not knowing certainly whether you would care to have it. But I have been shown that this was not honest. Whether you will have it or not, my dearest, I must show my heart to you, I must implore you to take it, to forgive its imperfections, to count as its one merit that it is all your own. It is myself, my beloved, who am at your feet. My life, my hopes, my love, are all yours, and have been for so long.... Can you forget that I withheld them when they were not mine to keep? Can you forgive that they are so poor, so imperfect, so unworthy?"