“I would die for him!”
Rufus had hitherto spoken, standing. He now took a chair.
“If Amelius had not been brought up at Tadmor,” he said, “I should take my hat, and wish you good morning. As things are, a word more may be a word in season. Your lessons here seem to have agreed with you, Miss. You’re a different sort of girl to what you were when I last saw you.”
She surprised him by receiving that remark in silence. The colour left her face. She sighed bitterly. The sigh puzzled Rufus: he held his opinion of her in suspense, until he had heard more.
“You said just now you would die for Amelius,” he went on, eyeing her attentively. “I take that to be a woman’s hysterical way of mentioning that she feels interest in Amelius. Are you fond enough of him to leave him, if you could only be persuaded that leaving him was for his good?”
She abruptly left the table, and went to the window. When her back was turned to Rufus, she spoke. “Am I a disgrace to him?” she asked, in tones so faint that he could barely hear them. “I have had my fears of it, before now.”
If he had been less fond of Amelius, his natural kindness of heart might have kept him silent. Even as it was, he made no direct reply. “You remember how you were living when Amelius first met with you?” was all he said.
The sad blue eyes looked at him in patient sorrow; the low sweet voice answered—“Yes.” Only a look and a word—only the influence of an instant—and, in that instant, Rufus’s last doubts of her vanished!
“Don’t think I say it reproachfully, my child! I know it was not your fault; I know you are to be pitied, and not blamed.”
She turned her face towards him—pale, quiet, and resigned. “Pitied, and not blamed,” she repeated. “Am I to be forgiven?”