"Wait, dear. All I want to be sure of is that you do love me enough to—to go on loving me. I want to be certain, and I want you to be certain before you are a bride——"
She was growing very much excited, and suddenly near to tears, for the one thing that endangered her self-control seemed to be his doubt of her.
"There is nothing that I haven't forgiven you," she said. "Nothing! There is nothing I won't forgive—except—one thing——"
"What?"
"I can't say it. I can't even think it. All I know is that now I couldn't forgive it." Suddenly she became perfectly quiet.
"I know what you mean," he said.
"Yes. It is what no wife can forgive." She looked at him, clear eyed, intelligent, calm; for the moment without any illusion; and he seemed to feel that, in the light of what she knew of him, she was coolly weighing the danger of the experiment. Never had he seen so cold and lustrous a brow, such limpid clarity of eye, searching, fearless, direct. Then, in an instant, it all seemed to melt into flushed and winsome loveliness; and she was murmuring that she loved him, and asking pardon for even one second's hesitation.
"It never could be; it is unthinkable," she whispered. "And it is too late anyway for me—I would love you now, whatever you killed in me. Because I must go on loving you, Jim; for that is the way it is with me, and I know it now. As long as there is life in me I'll strive for you in my own fashion—even against yourself—to keep you for mine, to please you, to be to you and to the world what you wish me to be—for your honour and your happiness—which also must be my own—the only happiness, now, that I can ever understand."
He held her in his arms, smoothing the bright hair, touching the white brow with his lips at moments, happy because he was so deeply in love, fearful because of it—and, deep in his soul, miserable, afraid lest aught out of his past life return again to mock her—lest some echo of folly offend her ears—some shadow fall—some phantom of dead days rise from their future hearth to stand between them.
It is that way with a man who has lived idly and irresponsibly, and who has gone lightly about the pleasure of life and not its business. For sometimes there arrives an hour of unbidden clairvoyance—not necessarily a spiritual awakening—but a moment of balanced intelligence and sanity and clear vision. And when it arrives, the road to yesterday suddenly becomes visible for its entire length; and when a man looks back he sees it stretching away behind him, peopled with every shape that has ever traversed it, and every spectre that ever has haunted it.