“What letter?”
“The letter I wrote to you before we were married.”
Am I a coward? The bare recollection of what followed that reply makes me tremble. Time has passed. I am a new man now; my health is restored; my happiness is assured: I ought to be able to write on. No: it is not to be done. How can I think coolly? how force myself to record the suffering that I innocently, most innocently, inflicted on the sweetest and truest of women? Nothing saved us from a parting as absolute as the parting that follows death but the confession that had been wrung from me at a time when my motive spoke for itself. The artless avowal of her affection had been justified, had been honored, by the words which laid my heart at her feet when I said “I love you.”
She had risen to leave me. In a last look, we had silently resigned ourselves to wait, apart from each other, for the day of reckoning that must follow Rothsay’s return, when we heard the sound of carriage-wheels on the drive that led to the house. In a minute more the man himself entered the room.
He looked first at Susan—then at me. In both of us he saw the traces that told of agitation endured, but not yet composed. Worn and weary he waited, hesitating, near the door.
“Am I intruding?” he asked.
“We were thinking of you, and speaking of you,” I replied, “just before you came in.”
“We?” he repeated, turning toward Susan once more. After a pause, he offered me his hand—and drew it back.
“You don’t shake hands with me,” he said.