"Then let me do this for my own sake," she said. "Listen to me calmly for a moment. There is one thing you ought not to forget. Either I am your wife, which God forbid, and I believe he has forbidden it, or I am simply Katie's friend. In case of the first,—if I have destroyed your happiness and Katie's, and my own,—what can money do for me? Life offers me nothing; there are no possibilities before me so far as joy is concerned; there is nothing left for me but to do the best I know how; we must pick up the little things that lie along the way in life, you and I; there will be nothing else for us; I have made you suffer so much, and you deny me this little thing that can never balance any pain, but is all I can dot? Why are you so unwise? Why should we make ourselves more miserable than we need be?"
He sprang up. These very words—that he had often said to himself in regard to his own life, that in effect he had said to her that morning—how harsh they were, how they cut him! He was tender with his wounded vanity. What man would like to hear that a woman has nothing before her but misery if she be bound to himself?
"There is one condition," he cried, harshly, "under which I will accept your money,—when you love me; when it is the gift of love." He laughed bitterly. "I am safe," he said.
"Yes, Mr. Archdale, you are safe," she answered, rising to meet him as he stood before her. "I can use no such weapons. It is beneath you to do it. To say such a thing to me when you know that in any event my great blessing is that I don't care a pin's worth for you, that I am not a sighing woman wasting her affection on you, while you—But I don't suppose you meant your words as an insult."
"Have I ever been rude to you?" he asked, eagerly. "Such a thing would be an infinite disgrace to me."
"Yes," she said, answering his assertion.
"'While you,'" he repeated, "you said 'while you'—What were you going to say about me?"
"While you love Katie with all your heart," she answered, "as it is right you should do." He looked at her, and remembered that for all her courage it might be that he owed her at least the courtesy of all observances of respect and regard before others. He had committed an unpardonable error that day of the dinner at his father's, and he felt a confusion, as if the color were coming to his face now as he thought of it.
"You—mistake," he stammered. "I assure you you do. I think I understand—I"—
She looked up at him. Her face was pale, and there was in it the kind of compassion that one might imagine a spirit to feel for a wayworn mortal.