"Marcella!—wife!" was all he said, and that in a voice so low, so choked, that she could hardly hear it.
He held her so for a minute or more, she weeping, his own eyes dim with tears, her cheek laid against the stormy beating of his heart.
At last he raised her face, so that he could see it.
"So this—this was what you had in your mind towards me, while I have been despairing—fighting with myself, walking in darkness. Oh, my darling! explain it. How can it be? Am I real? Is this face—these lips real?"—he kissed both, trembling. "Oh! when a man is raised thus—in a moment—from torture and hunger to full joy, there are no words—"
His head sank on hers, and there was silence again, while he wrestled with himself.
At last she looked up, smiling.
"You are to please come over here," she said, and leading him by the hand, she took him to the other side of the room. "That is the chair you sat in that morning. Sit down!"
He sat down, wondering, and before he could guess what she was going to do she had sunk on her knees beside him.
"I am going to tell you," she said, "a hundred things I never told you before. You are to hear me confess; you are to give me penance; you are to say the hardest things possible to me. If you don't I shall distrust you."
She smiled at him again through her tears. "Marcella," he cried in distress, trying to lift her, to rise himself, "you can't imagine that I should let you kneel to me!"