She arose as she ceased speaking, thus intimating that she desired the interview to terminate.
"And that is all you have to say to me? Oh, Isabel!" Gerald Goddard gasped, and realizing how regally beautiful she had become, how infinitely superior, physically and morally, spiritually and intellectually, she was to the woman for whose sake he had trampled her in the dust. And the fact was forced upon him that she was one to be worshiped for her sweet graciousness and purity of character—to be reverenced for her innate nobility and stanch adherence to principle, and to be exultantly proud of, could he have had the right to be—as a queen among women.
"That is all," she replied, with slow thoughtfulness, "unless, as a woman who is deeply interested in the moral advancement of humanity in general, I urge you once more to make your future better than your past has been, that thus the world may be benefited, in ever so slight a measure, because you have lived. As for you and me, our ways part here, never to cross again, I trust; for, while I have ceased to grieve over the blighted hopes of my youth, it would be painful to be reminded of my early mistakes."
"Part—forever? I do not feel that I can have it so," said Gerald Goddard, with white lips, "for—I love you at this moment a thousand times more than I ever—"
"Stop!" Isabel Stewart firmly commanded. "Such an avowal from you at this time is but an added insult to me, as well as a cowardly wrong against her who, in the eyes of the world, at least, has sustained the relationship of wife to you for many years."
The head of the proud man dropped before her with an air of humility entirely foreign to the "distinguished" Gerald Goddard whom the world knew; but, though crushed by a sense of shame and grief, he could but own to himself that her condemnation was just, and the faint hope that had sprung up in his heart died, then and there, its tragic death.