‘Victoria, if only I had known; if only I had understood!’
‘Oh, how dreadful, if you thought me light-minded, playing you off and on. All that I wanted was to like you as much as I dared, without having you like me more than you ought. I should have done, what I see now I must do—send you away, for both our sakes. If I did not see it at once, pity, dear friend, pity, and forgive!
‘Then, I prayed again for help; and see how the help has come! We might both of us have been too weak for that sacrifice, but now it is laid upon us without our wills. You must go.’
‘I will come back, come to claim you, my Victoria, to bring you your word of release, to take you, whether you will or no.’
‘You will never come back,’ she said in a tone that seemed to be beyond both hope and despair, and she held my face up to the light and looked down into it with tender yet tearless eyes. ‘You ought not to come back: your place is in the great world—poor little great world! Try to think there is something nobler than love for one—pity for all. Go; and live for those poor people you have talked about to me.’
‘I am not equal to it: I could only die for them, at best.’
‘Still—I know what I am saying—others must claim you: your station——’
‘O Victoria, is your opinion of me so low? Do you send me back to resume the “English gentleman”; and to hide my shame in being nothing in the smug proprieties of that poor creature’s lot?’
‘I do not know, dear friend, but this I feel—we must lose you for ever: no one returns here.’
‘Then let me never go away,’ I cried, rising, and clasping her again to my heart. ‘Let me love you, and be with you for ever, and forget all the world beside.’