"Certainly not—that is, presuming the panorama of this happy year had been foreshadowed to me in sleep. And you—you surely would not have me do so, eh? Your present feelings tally with mine, do they not?"
"My present feelings! Will you let me tell you what they are? If—if I had this year to spend over again, if we had, as we so futilely presume, lived through it in a painful sleep, its every pang, its every troubled experience—"
"Yes, I follow you."
"And you were to bring me here and ask me to be your wife again, my answer would be 'Yes.' I would marry you, Tom, if you had not a penny in the world to tempt me with—marry you if I knew you to be a vagrant, a homeless vagrant, as they say you once were, wandering through the streets of Kelvick, and that I had to share a garret with you until the day I died! You don't believe me—ah, you don't believe me?"
She approaches, and lays a shaking hand on his arm. He turns with a fierce oath, his face blazing with scorn, repulsion, contempt unutterable, and, hurling her from him, strides from the room.
"Believe you? Believe you? By Heaven, I don't!" are his hot parting words.
Her head strikes rather sharply against the woodwork of the window; she remains for a few moments with eyes closed, struggling against nausea, then lifts her handkerchief to her mouth, from which a thin red stream is issuing slowly.