“Why, if you love me, if you forgive me,” she answered softly, “do you leave me?”
“Can you not understand?”
“In part, I can. But not altogether. Will you explain? I—I think,” she continued with a movement of her flower-like head, that for gentle dignity he had never seen excelled, “I have a right to an explanation.”
“You know of what Sir Robert accused me?”
“Yes.”
“Am I to justify him? You know what was the difference which came between us, which first divided us? And what I thought right then, I still think right. Am I to abandon it? You know what I bore. Am I to live on the bounty of one who once thought so ill of me, and may think as ill again? Of one who, differing from me, punished me so cruelly? Am I to sink into dependence, to sacrifice my judgment, to surrender my political liberty into the hands of one who——”
“Of my father!” she said gravely.
He could not, so reminded, say what he had been going to say, but he assented by a movement of the head. And after an interval of silence, “I cannot,” he cried passionately, “I cannot, even to secure my happiness, run that risk!”
She looked from the window of the carriage, and in a voice which shook a little, “No,” she said, “I suppose not.”
He was silent and he suffered. He dared not meet her eyes. Why had she sought this interview? Why had she chosen to torment him? Ah, if she knew, if she only knew what pain she was inflicting upon him!