"Can I ever hope for your forgiveness?"
"It seems to me that I have nothing to forgive," she answered, in a low voice. "If circumstances misled you, you could not be blamed for acting upon them, according to your belief."
"Sara!"--he laid his hand upon her shoulder, and his voice shook with the intensity of its emotion--"may I dare to hope that you will let me in my future life strive to atone for this?"
"How atone for it?" she faltered.
"Will you generously look over the past folly?--will you suffer it to be between us as it used to be?--will you be my wife at last?"
She trembled as she stood, the conscious light of love mantling in her cheek and in her drooping eye. Mr. Oswald Cray held her before him, waiting and watching for the answer, his lips parted with suspense.
"My brother's crime remains still," she whispered. "A memento of the past."
"Your brother's crime! Should you be punished for that?--for him? And what of my brother?" he continued, the revelation of the day imparting to his tone a whole world of remorse, of self-condemning repentance. "What disgrace has not my brother brought to me? O Sara; should the ill wrought by these ties part us? It never ought to have done so. Let us stand alone, henceforth, you and I, independent of the world! Don't try me too greatly! don't punish me, as in justice you might!"
For a moment her eyes looked straight into his with a loving, earnest glance, and then dropped again. "I will be your wife, Oswald," she simply said. "I have never tried to forget you, for I knew I could not."
And as if relief from the tension of suspense were too great for entire silence, a faint sound of emotion broke from Oswald Cray. And he bent to take from her lips that kiss, left upon them so long ago in the garden-parlour of the old house at Hallingham.