He had thought of her night and day, at his work and in his lonely cell, and her image would be stamped indelibly on his heart as long as he should live.
But he had no right to speak one word of it to her now—his disgrace clung to him, and would clog him, perhaps, for long years.
Oh! if he could but break the cruel fetters that bound him—if he could but discover the real criminal, and clear his own name, then he might hope to win the respect of the world once more, fame and position, and the right to tell this gentle girl how dear she was to him.
“Yes,” she returned, noticing his emphasis, and fearing she might have wounded him by wording her sentence thus; “and, Earle. I think you are very—very noble now, to bear your trouble so patiently and uncomplainingly, and something tells me that it will not be so very long before all the world will be proud to call you friend.”
She spoke softly, but in a tone that thrilled him through and through.
“And then——”
The words came breathlessly, and before he could stop them. They would not be stayed.
He bent eagerly toward her, his heart in his eyes, his face full of passion which so nearly mastered him.
But he checked them, biting them off short as he had done before, but growing white even to his lips with the effort it cost him.
Something in his tones made her start and look up, and she read it all as in an open book—all his love for her, all the blighted hopes of the past, the longing and bitterness of the present, wherein he writhed beneath the stigma resting upon him, and the mighty self-control which would not presume upon her sympathy.