Royal Bryant listened to the pathetic tale without once interrupting the fair narrator, and Edith's heart sank more and more in her bosom as she proceeded, and feared that she was so shocking him by these revelations that his affection for her would die with this expose of her secret.
But he still held her hand clasped in his; and when, at the conclusion of her story, she gently tried to withdraw it, his fingers closed more firmly over hers, when, bending still nearer to her, he questioned, in fond, eager tones:
"Was this the reason of your leaving New York so abruptly last December?"
"Yes."
"Was it because you loved me and could not trust yourself to meet me day after day without betraying the fact when you feared that the knowledge of your birth might become a barrier between us? Tell me, my darling, truly!"
"Yes," Edith confessed; "but how could you guess it—how could you read my heart so like an open book?"
The young man laughed out musically, and there was a ring of joyous triumph in the sound.
"'Tis said that 'love is blind,'" he said, "but mine was keen to read the signs I coveted, and I believed, even when you were in your deepest trouble, that you were beginning to love me, and that I should eventually win you."
"Why! did you begin to—" Edith began, and then checked herself in sudden confusion.
"Did I begin to plan to win you so far back as that?" he laughingly exclaimed, and putting his own interpretation upon her half-finished sentence. "My darling, I began to love you and to wish for you even before your first day's work was done for me."