“You owe me no thanks—no thanks at all,” he said, and his voice was almost gruff. “I but sought to undo the evil I had done.”
“That ... that was before the plague came to my rescue. In what you did then, you sought at the risk of your life to make me the only possible amend, and to deliver me from the evil man into whose power you had brought me. But the plague, now. It was no fault of yours that I took that. It was already upon me when you brought me hither.”
“No matter for that,” said he. “Reparation was due. I owed it to myself.”
“You did not owe it to yourself to risk your life for me.”
“My life, madam, is no great matter. A life misused, misspent, has no great value. It was the least that I could offer.”
“Perhaps,” she answered gently. “But also it was the most, and, as I have said, far more than you owed.”
“I do not think so. But the matter is not worth contending.”
He did not help her. Persuaded of the scorn that must underline her utterances, however smooth—because conscious that scorn was his only desert—he accepted her words as expressions of a pitying gratitude that offended. He stood before her, overwhelmed by the consciousness of his unworthiness, in a mood of the most abject humility. But unconsciously, without suspecting it, he had empanoplied this humility in pride. His desire, above all, was to withdraw from an interview that could be nothing but a source of pain.
But she detained him, persisting in what he accounted her cruel charity.
“At least the reparation you have made is a very full one.”