She turned to him in sudden alarm; the news was quite unexpected.
"My friend—my brother," she said impulsively, "do not leave me! Not yet, not yet!"
The moment had come. The love pent up in La Pommeraye's heart would be restrained no longer, and burst from him in a torrent of passionate words. She could not stop him now; it was too late. She stood pale and silent as he poured forth all the love and longing of those weary years. Her heart was moved with a great compassion for him; but when, encouraged by her silence, he touched her hand, she drew it suddenly from him. Before her rose the dead face of him who had been as truly her husband as if a priest had blessed their marriage; she felt once more the touch of her child's lips at her breast; she saw again that double grave on the lonely hillside so many thousand miles away. She had loved once, and her heart was dead and buried in that far-off grave. Life held no second love for her, henceforth there was nothing left her but the memory of that which once had been. But her friend, her only support and comfort, must she lose him too? Heaven was cruel indeed to her. She covered her face with her hands.
"God help me!" she said shudderingly. "It cannot be."
He thought she was relenting. In an instant he had taken her hands in his, while he pleaded passionately for time, for hope; no promise, only permission to spend his life in her service, only a word to carry with him on his journey. But she had regained her self-control, and spoke now with a quiet, sad decision that was as a death-knell to his heart.
"My friend," she said, "I would have saved you this if I could. I have tried to spare you, and"—her voice trembled—"to spare myself. Hush," as he was about to interrupt, "it is because I do love you—though not in the way you wish—that I would have spared us both this parting. You are all I have left in the world—if I lose you, I am indeed alone."
She stopped a moment. There were no tears in the wide, dark eyes as she looked straight before her, over the gleaming river, but her face was white as death in the moonlight, and the lines about her mouth told of the hidden depths of feeling beneath that quiet exterior. Charles had sprung to his feet, an impetuous outburst on his lips, but she silenced him with uplifted hand.
"Come," she said, "let us continue our walk, and I will tell you what I have thought I should tell to no living being on earth."
And there, with tearless eyes and in a voice that never faltered, she told him the whole story of those three years on the island, omitting nothing, giving the outlines clearly and briefly, but with a vividness which burned the details on Charles' throbbing brain as if they had been branded with a hot iron.