“You understood that his feelings were changed towards you?”
“To some extent.”
She drew a deep breath and sat back. “Then it is for you to speak,” she said.
But before, agitated as he was, he could speak, she leant forward again. “No,” she said, “I had forgotten. I had forgotten.” And the slight quivering of her lips, a something piteous in her eyes, reminded him once more, once again—and the likeness tugged at his heart—of the Mary Smith who had paused on the threshold of the inn at Maidenhead, alarmed and abashed by the bustle of the coffee-room. “I had forgotten! It is not my father you cannot forgive—it is I, who am unworthy of your forgiveness? You cannot make allowance,” she continued, stopping him by a gesture, as he opened his mouth to speak, “for the weakness of one who had always been dependent, who had lived all her life under the dominion of others, who had been taught by experience that, if she would eat, she must first obey. You can make no allowance, Mr. Vaughan, for such an one placed between a father, whom it was her duty to honour, and a lover to whom she had indeed given her heart, she knew not why—but whom she barely knew, with whose life she had no real acquaintance, whose honesty she must take on trust, because she loved him? You cannot forgive her because, taught all her life to bend, she could not, she did not stand upright under the first trial of her faith?”
“No!” he cried violently. “No! No! It is not that!”
“No?” she said. “You do forgive her then? You have forgiven her? The more as to-day she is not weak. The earth is not level over my mother’s grave, some may say hard things of me—but I have come to you to-day.”
“God bless you!” he cried.
She drew a deep breath and sat back. “Then,” she said, with a sigh as of relief, “it is for you to speak.”
There was a gravity in her tone, and so complete an absence of all self-consciousness, all littleness, that he owned that he had never known her as she was, had never measured her true worth, had never loved her as she deserved to be loved. Yet—perhaps because it was all that was left to him—he clung desperately to the resolution he had formed, to the position which pride and prudence alike had bidden him to take up.
“What am I to say?” he asked hoarsely.