"I have been very wrong," she interrupted. "I meant to have told you so. I have not behaved as—as—I ought to behave for a long while; I acknowledge it. Won't you forgive me?"
"No," he answered—and his voice had no relenting in it.
"I will try and do better; I will indeed," she reiterated: not daring now to offer the caresses her imagination had planned out. "Oh, you must forgive me; you must not put me away!"
"Lady Adela, but a few days ago, it was my turn to make supplication to you; I did so more than once. I told you I would protect, forgive, shield you. I prayed you, almost as solemnly as I pray to Heaven, to trust me—your husband—as you wished it to be well with us in our future life. Do you remember how you met that prayer?—how you answered me?"
Yes, she did. And her face flushed painfully at the remembrance.
"As you rejected me, so must I reject you."
"Not to separation!"
"Separation will be only too welcome to you. Have you not been telling me as much for years?"
"But not in earnest; not to mean it really. I will give up play—I have given it up; believe that. A man may not reject his wife," she continued in agitation.
"He may—when he has sufficient reason for it. Look at the wife you have been to me; the shameful treatment you have persistently dealt to me. I speak not now of this recent act of disgrace, by which you hazarded your own good name and mine—I will not trust myself to speak of it—but of the past. Few men would have borne with you as I have borne. I loved you with a true and tender love: how have you repaid me?"