But she only murmurs, "Go away; please go away! please let me alone!"—the words coming half-broken, half-lost, from behind the covering of her hands.
He puts up his, and tries to draw away the screen from her shamed discomfited face, saying, "Look at me, Essie!" But she, with all her feeble strength, resists.
"I cannot!—I cannot!" she cries, vehemently; "don't ask me! Why didn't I die? When they saw I was getting well, they ought to have killed me. Oh, I wish they had!"
"I'm rather glad, on the whole, they did not," he answers, gravely; and so, with one final effort, he being strong, and she being weak, he obtains possession of her two hands, and her face lies bare, unshaded—dyed with an agony of shame—clothed with great beauty—under the hungry tenderness of his happy eyes.
"To think of making one's last dying speech and confession, and then not dying after all," she says, in torments of confusion, yet unable to restrain an uneasy laugh. "It is too disgraceful! I shall never get over it! Never!—NEVER!—NEVER!!"
"Time, which mitigates all afflictions, may mitigate yours," he replies, gaily, unable to resist the exquisite pleasure of teasing her.
She turns from him with a petulant movement of head and shoulder. "Why don't you go?" she cries, the angry tears flashing into her eyes; "I hate the sight of you!"
At that he grows grave. "Essie," he says, slipping his arms round her as she sits, shrinking away from him in the deep chintz chair, "in that awful moment, when you thought—and God knows I thought so too—that we were saying 'goodbye' to one another for always, the barriers that your wretched false pride had built up between us were knocked down; try as you may, you can never build them up again."
"I knocked down plenty of barriers, I'm aware," she answers, ruefully. "You need not remind me of that!"
"Never to be built up again any more—never any more!" he says, his mirth swallowed up in great solemn joy.