"You consider that barrier an insuperable one—that I ought not to have avowed my love?"
I burst into hysterical tears. It was the last insult: and the last feather, you know, breaks the camel's back. Alas! we were at cross-purposes.
"Forgive me, Anne," he sadly cried. "Before I remembered that there might be danger in your companionship; before I was aware that love could ever dawn for me, it had come, and was filling every crevice of my heart. It is stirring within me now as I speak to you. My pulses are thrilling with the bliss of your presence; my whole being tells of the gladness of heaven."
In spite of the cruel wrong; in spite of my own bitter misery; in spite of the ties to which he was bound, to hear the avowal of this deep tenderness, stirred with a rapture akin to his every fibre of my rebellious love. I know how terribly wrong it must seem; I know how worse than wrong is the confession of it; but so it was. I was but human.
"I am aware that I have acted unwisely," he pursued, his tone very subdued and repentant. "Still—you must not blame me too greatly. Circumstances are at least as much in fault. We were thrown together, unavoidably; I could not, for reasons, absent myself from home; you were located in it. Of course I ought to have remembered that I was not free to love: but then you see, the danger did not occur to my mind. If it had, I should have been cold as an icicle."
To hear him defend himself seemed worse than all. I had thought, if there lived one man on the face of the earth who was the soul of nobility, uprightness, honour, it was Harry Chandos.
"It was the cruelest insult to me possible to be offered, Mr. Chandos."
"What was?"
"What was! The telling me of your love."
"Anne, I told it you because—forgive my boldness!—I saw that you loved me."