Gerard stands motionless in the moonlight, with folded arms, and a chill, painful smile on his stern mouth. "I have already announced my conviction of his superiority, and have advised you to return to him," he says.
"Do you mean really?" asks Essie, her wild, wide eyes flaming in half-incredulous fear on his face.
"I do," he answers, with icy steadiness.
"And you have done with me altogether?" she says, brokenly, her tears forcing their way through her slight shielding fingers, and falling one after another, slow and heavy, on the stones at her feet. "Serve me right!—Serve me right!"
Once again, intoxicated by her great fairness, he goes nigh to pardoning her; once again his obstinate will comes to his aid. "If I were to marry you now," he says, resolutely, "my life would be one long suspicion: I should love you madly, and should disbelieve in you."
With that, and his saying he should love her madly, a little creeping hope steals warmly about her heart. "Why should you disbelieve in me?" she asks, putting out a timid peace-making hand.
"Because a faith once broken can never be mended," he answers, sternly—"it may be patched up, but a patched faith will not do to go through life with; because a woman who has deceived a man once for one object may deceive him a second time for another. I should never," he says (words coming quicker and emotion deepening as he proceeds), "look in your sweet eyes without thinking I read some treachery in them; I should never press your heart against mine without fearing that it was beating for some one else."
She withdraws her rejected hand, and falls to weeping sorelier than ever, but very mutely.
"What madness induced you to tell me so many lies?" he cries, passionately, with mournful severity. "Were you bent on putting a gulf, that could never be bridged through all eternity, between us? Did not you know that that is the one sin I could never forget or forgive?"
She looks down humbled and crestfallen, and says, sobbingly, "I was afraid of you. I thought that, if I told you, I should lose you as I have done now, without telling you. I was on the point of speaking two or three times, but you looked so angry that my courage failed, and I dared not."