He makes a movement to interrupt her, but she continues. "When a person has once lost confidence in another, they can never get it quite back again; you would never quite trust me. Only the other day you thought hard things of me, because I seemed grateful to Mr. Linley for talking friendly to me: I saw it in your eyes as you rode past us that night: and—which is the last and greatest reason of all—you would not like people to say of your wife the things that Miss Blessington will enable them to say of me."
"Even granting," breaks in Gerard, with indignant violence—"and God forbid my ever granting anything of the kind!—that it is in her or any one else's power to blast your reputation, what pleasure could it possibly give one girl to sully the good name of another, whom she must know in her heart of hearts to be as innocent as herself?"
"None whatever, perhaps, if I remain as I am," she answers, collectedly, though a little bitterly. "As Esther Craven, I am too insignificant to clash with her; but if I were to be your wife—if I were to be her successor in that position for which she is, in her own and her friends' opinion, so well suited—would not she be likely to give her own explanation of the change? She would describe things as they seemed to her, and people would believe her."
"Let them!" he answers scornfully. "If you loved me perfectly, the only people that existed in the world for you would be yourself and me."
"I do not love you perfectly, then, I suppose," she answers, calmly; "for not even the enormous happiness of being with you always, of being half your life, could compensate me for the degradation of bringing you a sullied name."
He turns away, with hands clenched and lips bitten, in the endeavour to be master of his useless surging rage.
"St. John," she says resolutely, laying her hand upon one of his, "you have made me two promises—one that you will go away and leave me to-day, and one that you will leave me never until I send you away. I keep you to the first: I send you away."
"But I will not be sent," he cries fiercely, giving the reins to his passion. "The conditions under which that promise was made are utterly changed; the obstacle that parted us then no longer exists: there is none between us now but what is of your own raising. I am, therefore, no longer bound by that oath; I will not go!"
"Very well," she answers, sighing: "then I must; and when one is to have a foot or a hand cut off, it is best to do it at once. St. John, I will not sleep another night under the same roof with you! Goodbye!"
But he turns away sullenly. "You may say 'goodbye' to me, but I will never say 'goodbye' to you: death is the only 'goodbye' I will accept as valid between us."