'And are you resolved that it never shall?' he asks, under his breath.
She pauses a moment before answering, while her eyes escape from the tyranny of his, and fix themselves on a row of tulips, rearing their striped and colour-splashed cups upon their strong, straight stalks, in the border before her. With the potent light smiting through them, they look as if they were cut out of some hard precious stone—sardonyx, or beryl, or bdellium—goblets to be filled with fairy wine at the feast of some mage-king.
'I do not know,' she says, with her lips trembling; 'I am not sure. When I see Prue—when I know that it has brought all the pain she has suffered—and she has suffered a good deal—more than you would think, to look at her, that she could bear—into her life—my one prayer is to keep clear of it; and yet—and yet'—with a yearning in her voice—'one would not like to die having quite missed it. Oh, tell me'—with a change in her tone to one of compelling entreaty, bringing back the eyes but now so sedulously averted from him, and plunging them into his under the shade of the hawthorn bough—'were you really speaking truth when you said you had come down from London only to see me? Are you quite sure—quite—that that was your real motive?'
'Quite.'
'Nobody would believe it,' she says, with a sort of wonder in her voice; 'nobody thinks so. They all'—faltering a little—'they all think something quite different.'
'What does it matter what they think?' he cries hotly, the colour which unluckily is equally the livery of brazen guilt and oppressed innocence again mantling his face. 'What have we to do with their blatant suppositions? Are you going to let them come between us?'
'You will think me very suspicious,' she says tremulously—'very hard to be convinced of what most women would find it easy enough to believe—but—but—I care for very few people,' she goes on, beginning a fresh sentence without finishing the former one; 'but when I do care, I care very badly. Do not be angry with me if I say that I have a sort of dread of caring very badly about you.' If he had had his will, the conclusion of that sentence would have found her in his arms; but she holds herself gently aloof. 'If I once let myself love you,' she says, the tears stealing afresh into her eyes, 'I know that I could never unlove you again—never while I lived, try as I might; and if afterwards I found out——'
'Found out what?' breathlessly.
'You know,' she goes on, trying to speak firmly—'I am sure you must know—that when first I saw you, I had heard nothing but what was bad of you. That was my only excuse for the way in which I behaved to you. I had heard things about you—no; do not be afraid,' a writhing motion on his part conveying to her what her words are making him suffer. 'I am not going to ask you whether they were true. I have no business with your past; but what I must ask you—what I shall never have any peace until I have asked you,' her agitation deepening—'is whether if people said them now they would still be true?'
There is a moment's stillness before he answers—a moment long enough for the hawthorn's perfume to be for ever after wedded in her memory to that pregnant pause. It is almost in a whisper that she has put her question, and it is quite in a whisper that his answer comes: