For a moment she looks down on him silently, her face all quivering as with some fiery pain; then in a very low voice:
'Punishment!' she says; 'punishment! There is no question of punishment. It is only that you have killed my heart.'
'Killed—your—heart!' he repeats blankly, as if too stunned to take in the meaning of the phrase.
'Yes,' she says, breathing fast and heavily; 'yes. I do not think you knew what you were doing. I believe it was a sudden madness that seized you—such a madness as,' with a touch of scorn, 'may be common to men. I know but little of them and their ways; but—but—what security have I against its seizing you a second time?'
He writhes. A second time? Oh, if she did but know how little it had seized him the first!
'If I married you now,' she goes on, her voice gaining a greater firmness, and a new and forlorn stability coming into her white face, 'I should love you, certainly. Yes,' with a melancholy shake of her head, 'I think that I shall never leave off loving you now. But if I married you, I should make you very unhappy; I should not take things easily—I should not be patient. And however happy we might be when we were together, since you have killed my trust in you, you would never be out of sight that I should not be fancying that you were—as—as—as I saw you last night.'
Her voice has dropped to an almost inaudible pitch. He has risen to his feet again, and some instinct of self-respect helping him, stands silently before her, accepting the doom which, as he hopelessly feels, can be averted by no words that he has leave to utter.
To her ears has come the noise of nearing wheels—the wheels of the fly he had ordered over-night to take him to the station, allowing the smallest possible margin of time in which to get there, so that as little as possible might be robbed from the poignant sweetness of his last farewells.
The poignant sweetness! He almost laughs. That sound must have hit her ears too, judging by the long sob that swells her throat, and by the added rush of anguish in her next words:
'I ought to have believed what they told me of you, but I would not; I would believe only you—only you; and this is how you have rewarded me!'