“Of course we did,” she responded.
“‘Of course!’ You seem to treat the subject very lightly?”
“It is past, and is nothing to us now.”
“Elfride, it is a nothing which, though it may make a careless man laugh, cannot but make a genuine one grieve. It is a very gnawing pain. Tell me straight through—all of it.”
“Never. O Harry! how can you expect it when so little of it makes you so harsh with me?”
“Now, Elfride, listen to this. You know that what you have told only jars the subtler fancies in one, after all. The feeling I have about it would be called, and is, mere sentimentality; and I don’t want you to suppose that an ordinary previous engagement of a straightforward kind would make any practical difference in my love, or my wish to make you my wife. But you seem to have more to tell, and that’s where the wrong is. Is there more?”
“Not much more,” she wearily answered.
Knight preserved a grave silence for a minute. “‘Not much more,’” he said at last. “I should think not, indeed!” His voice assumed a low and steady pitch. “Elfride, you must not mind my saying a strange-sounding thing, for say it I shall. It is this: that if there WERE much more to add to an account which already includes all the particulars that a broken marriage engagement could possibly include with propriety, it must be some exceptional thing which might make it impossible for me or any one else to love you and marry you.”
Knight’s disturbed mood led him much further than he would have gone in a quieter moment. And, even as it was, had she been assertive to any degree he would not have been so peremptory; and had she been a stronger character—more practical and less imaginative—she would have made more use of her position in his heart to influence him. But the confiding tenderness which had won him is ever accompanied by a sort of self-committal to the stream of events, leading every such woman to trust more to the kindness of fate for good results than to any argument of her own.
“Well, well,” he murmured cynically; “I won’t say it is your fault: it is my ill-luck, I suppose. I had no real right to question you—everybody would say it was presuming. But when we have misunderstood, we feel injured by the subject of our misunderstanding. You never said you had had nobody else here making love to you, so why should I blame you? Elfride, I beg your pardon.”