“Are you still so deeply offended with me?” she said. “Can you not forgive me, Fan?”
“Not now, Mary,” the other returned, casting down her eyes. “I can't forgive you just yet for treating me in that way—for saying such things to me. I shall try to forget it before to-morrow.”
Mary made no reply, nor did she move; and Fan, after waiting some time, looked at her, not as she had expected, to find her friend's eyes fixed on her own, but to see them cast down and full of tears.
“I am sorry you are crying, dear Mary,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice. “But—it can make no difference—I mean just now. I feel that I cannot forgive you now.”
“How unfeeling you are, Fan! Do you remember what you said the other night, that if I shut my door against you you would come and sit on the doorstep?”
“Yes, I remember very well.”
“And it makes no difference?”
“No, not now.”
“And I have so often treated you badly—so badly, and you have always been ready to forgive me. Shall I tell you all the wicked things I have done for which you have forgiven me?”
“No, you need not tell me. When you have treated me unkindly I have always felt that there was something to be said for you—that it was a mistake, and that I was partly to blame. But this is different. You said a little while ago that you turned on me, when you were angry with someone else, simply because I happened to be there for you to rend. That is what I thought too.”