Great was his relief when Pauline, starting from her seat, almost screamed aloud her agitated reply.
"No, it is not true! I never married him. That is—at least—no, I entirely deny it. I am not his wife. I am not married to him."
In his state of mind and inexperience he failed to notice the equivocal nature of this denial. He heard the impassioned negatives; he saw fear, resentment, and a sort of womanly repulsion in the frightened gesture she flung upon the air, and what he wished to hear and prayed to hear, that he heard. Crabbe then had deliberately lied perhaps, considering his condition, he had only boastfully invented.
"Thank God!" he ejaculated, standing up and taking Miss Clairville's finely formed white hand in both of his own. "Thank God!" he repeated, and, with restored confidence and renewed enthusiasm in all good works, he seized the opportunity to speak of what was in his heart. "Now you must listen to me. I believe, I honestly believe, that by His all-wise and all-knowing ruling I have been sent here to help you and be your friend. That letter I wrote to you—you received it I know, for I heard about it. I went West from a sense of duty. I was not required, and again the sense of duty brought me back to St. Ignace and—you."
"Oh, not only me! You would have come back in any case. You say it was Duty, not,—not——" Not Desire? If this were thought in some vague and unapprehended shape, it was not spoken. Ringfield gave her hand a strong and kindly pressure and let it fall.
"It was duty, yes, duty revealed to me by my Maker, to serve and obey whom is not only my duty but my whole desire and pleasure."
"You really mean what you say in telling me this? It sounds like things we read, like the little books they gave us at Sorel-en-haut. Mon Dieu! but those little books! And one big one there was, a story-book about a girl, all about a girl. A girl called Ellen, Ellen something, I have forgotten."
"That must have been 'The Wide, Wide World'. And you read that while you were at school!"
"Yes, when I was a young girl. I am afraid it didn't do me much good."
These interchanges of simple talk marked the progress of their friendship. Any fact about her past or present life, no matter how trivial, was of astonishing interest to him. And to her, the knowledge that she was already and swiftly, passionately, purely dear to a being of Ringfield's earnest mould and serious mien, so different to the other man who had come into her life, gave a sense of delicious triumph and joy. They continued to talk thus, in accents growing momentarily more tender, of many things connected with her youth and his calling, and the fact that they kept their voices down so intimately low lent additional zest and delight to the situation. Only when Ringfield alluded directly to Edmund Crabbe did she show uneasiness.