As he spoke these last few words a number of conflicting thoughts passed through Kate’s mind. With only the vaguest notion of his meaning, jealousy shot a stinging, momentary, utterly illogical shaft through her heart, which was followed by a profoundly feminine feeling of injury in being thus coolly told that she would have been addressed had not some paramount other interest absorbed his mind.
“Indeed?” she remarked, with what she thought was biting sarcasm, but which a much less penetrating mind than Maxwell Fair’s would have at once taken as an indication of jealousy and love. “And so you plume yourself, do you, on considering your wife and children an idea, a cause, a purpose, to which, for good or ill, you have made up your mind to give all that you are? Heroic, I must say, and so unusual.”
“Governess! Sunday-school moralizer!” he jeered at her. “No, nor was I deterred by that still more arrant humbug about ‘penniless and dependent females’ that you learned from our past masters of humbug and lachrymose moral biliousness, the great novelists. No, it was not because you were a poor orphan girl in my employ, and, consequently, incapable of defending yourself, that I refrained from speaking to you. Rubbish! The cant of moral snobs! As if the virtue of poor girls was made of weaker stuff than that of rich ones! My God, did I want victims, I swear I would pursue them in drawing-rooms with more success than in the servants’ hall.”
“I really cannot see what all this has to do with you and me,” coldly remarked Miss Mettleby when he paused.
“You will see presently,” Fair answered, ignoring her freezing manner and with rapidly growing intensity and feeling. “I remained silent. I crucified my heart, denied my soul. But that night, Kate, when you and I alone were clinging to the yacht and neither of us hoped to see the sun again, I told you. It was my right. It was your right as well.”
“And, half dead as I was, I shamed you, sir, and called you what you were by every law of God and man and honor,” she flung back at him with a flush of remembered nobility very comforting in the light of more recent less lofty thoughts.
“Yes,” replied Fair, with his old-time elevation and calmness, which were a mainspring of his influence over her; “yes, the habits of a lifetime cling to us, Kate, making us dare to lie upon the very edge of death and coming judgment. I loved you, and I told you. You loved me, and denied it. And we were both about to face eternity! Which of us would have faced it with the cleaner heart?”
“Oh, don’t, don’t!” she cried, shrinking from him. “You know I cannot argue with you. But I am sure that I was right, that I am right now. Please let me go.”
“In a moment, in a moment,” he answered, grasping her two hands. “I probably will never see you again, Kate—so let me now speak out. I asked you to take three months to think it over, and promised you that I would then give you the reasons for my strange conduct and beg of you to face the world with me for our great love’s sake.”
“Yes,” she said, freeing her hands; “you said you would be able to convince me that there was no dishonor in your love, no wrong in what you would propose that we should do. Three months you gave me—three months. Why, Mr. Fair, three minutes would be enough for me to reach the only possible decision which you, an English gentleman, can ask a young and unprotected English girl like me to make. But I was grateful for your three months’ silence. If you could trust yourself, I am compelled to own that I could not so trust myself. I love you—may God forgive me, but I cannot help it! But your chivalrous respite of three months has given me a grip upon myself. I do not fear myself. I do not fear even you. I am to leave your house, never to see you again. And some day you will thank me.”