"If you have cause to blame me, or if you wish to prevent my seeing you again, by upbraiding me for having spoken honestly to you, I beg of you to say nothing that way. It is not needed. You will run no danger whatever of being annoyed again. I blame myself more than you can; and since we must part, let us part friends, with a kindly recollection of each other——"
"Don't speak like that!" she said, imploringly, with another convulsive sob, "or you will break my heart. Is it not enough that—that—oh! I cannot, cannot tell you, and yet I must tell you!"
"What have you to tell me?" he said, with a cold feeling creeping over him. He began to suspect what her emotion meant; and he shrank from the suggestion, as from some great evil he had himself committed.
"You will think me shameless; I cannot help it. You say this is our last meeting; and I cannot bear to have you go away from me with the thought that you have to suffer alone. You think I ought to give you my sympathy, because I am your friend, and you will not be happy. But—but I will suffer too; and I am a woman—and alone—and whom have I to look to——?"
He stopped her, and looked down into her face.
"Annie, is this true?" he said, sadly and gravely.
He got no answer beyond the sight of her streaming eyes and quivering lips.
"Then are we the two wretchedest of God's creatures," he said.
"Ah, don't say that," she murmured, venturing to look up at him through her tears. "Should we not be glad to know that we can think kindly of each other, without shame? Unhappy, yes!—but surely not the very wretchedest of all. And you won't misunderstand me? You won't think, afterwards, that it was because I was an actress that I confessed this to you——?"
Even in such a moment a touch of Bohemianism!—a fear that her mother's profession should suffer by her weakness.