“I have waited, I have tried to be patient; don't give me your answer now! If it is no, it will leave me nothing! I have lived and struggled for this day; that I might tell you that I love you! You may not be ready to hear it—I did not intend to speak; nothing could have been further from my purpose ten minutes ago; but I have spoken, and you know that I love you. This love seems to go back to the very beginnings of my life—I don't want to think of a time when I did not love you; it seems impossible to even imagine such a time, as impossible as to imagine a future when I shall have ceased to love you! You may not value my love, but it is as much yours as any other possession you have in the world!”
Her resentment toward him was slowly taking a definite shape in her mind, she was seeing the fullest reason for it. She had counted him her friend, generously disinterested and wholly self-forgetful; she felt he had advanced under the cloak of friendship for Stephen, until he dared to speak of love to her. To her! To the widow of the man for whom he had professed such devotion! Yet she parted from her ideal of him with a sense of bitter personal loss, as from a living presence on which she had come wholly to rely. If she could not trust him, whom could she trust! He dwindled in all the generous goodness with which she had unconsciously invested him, to contemptible littleness and petty self-seeking.
His patient kindness, his innumerable sacrifices of time and convenience had been but the stepping stones toward this moment, when he dared to tell her that he loved her! Her anger flamed in her face; but when she spoke she still maintained the control which she had put upon herself from the start.
“I wish that you had allowed me to leave you before you said what you have. Of course it would have made no difference in the opinion I had formed of you, but I should not have been forced to speak of it.”
He would have said that in his fancy he had already lived through the possibilities of this moment; but he had never quite conceived it possible that she could treat him with such cold scorn. In his bitterness he could only ask himself how had he failed so utterly. At her words, however, and the tone in which she had spoken them, his selfrespect came to his rescue.
“You need not say anything that you may regret later on; that is quite unnecessary, for I think I know just how you feel toward me,” he said gently.
She knit-her brows in an angry frown, but his words impressed her, and her manner became more one of resentful kindness. After all she had no wish to hurt him; only he must understand the extent of his enormity, for in her jealous love for Stephen Landray it was nothing else.
“Have I ever said anything, has there ever been in my manner toward you, anything that could lead you to think I could so far forget myself as to wish to hear what you have just told me, from the lips of any living man?”
“No,” he said, “there has not been; yet—”
“If I have been at fault you must tell me. I will hear you without offence; then I can the sooner forgive you for the way in which you have misjudged me, I should almost be glad to think that in some way I had been to blame!”