But John ignored her look. His face was set and stubborn. He changed his position slightly and gathered her yet more determinedly in his arms, so that Bessie felt again how strong he was, and how much it means to woman's life to add a strength like that.
"Do you know, John," she prattled presently, out of the deepening bliss which this enormous sense of security inspired, "do you know that I used to fear for you? For me rather! To fear," she exclaimed with a happily apologetic little laugh, "that you might fall in love with Marien Dounay!"
But the laugh ended in a choke of surprise, when Bessie felt the body of the big man shiver like a tree in a blast.
"Why? Why? What is the matter, John?" she asked in helpless bewilderment, for the odd face with a profile like a mountain had taken on a look of pain, and while she questioned him, he put her from him and with a low groan sank down upon the bench.
* * * * *
The little summer house was still undisturbed by the rude, annoying outer world; but its atmosphere had subtly changed. A chill wind blew through the shrubbery and the fragrance of bush and flower was gone. Even the sun, as if he could not bear to look, had dropped behind the hill; for something had edged between the lovers.
Bessie's artless words made John remember as very, very near, what, during this delicious hour in her presence, had seemed to be worlds and worlds behind him, in fact made him feel his shame and guilt so deeply that he could no longer hold her in his arms. Then the story of his infatuation for Marien Dounay came out, as he had always felt it must, sometime, for the purging of his own soul, even if it were she who would suffer most,—the old, old law of vicarious suffering again!
Bessie listened with white, set face, while John resolutely spared himself nothing in the telling, but when the look of hurt and pain took up its abode permanently in those mild blue eyes, a feeling of yet more terrible misgiving overtook him and he would have checked the story if he could. But once started, his natural shrinking from hypocrisy compelled him to tell the truth.
"You can never know how I have reproached myself for it," he concluded. "I have suffered agonies of remorse. Wild with love of you, and the impulse to declare that love, I have stayed away six months. It seemed to me at first that I could hardly get my own consent to come at all from her to you; that I must doom myself to perpetual loneliness to expiate my sin. And yet, Bessie," John made the mistake of trying to extenuate, "it was probably not altogether unnatural, knowing man as I begin to know him."
To the young girl, facing the first bitter disillusionment of love, it came like a flash of intuition that this last was true; that men were like that—all men! They were mere brutes! This intuition maddened the girl, and her disturbed emotions expressed themselves in a burst of flaming anger.