She did not speak, but she slightly slackened her fierce pace, and seemed to be waiting for him to speak again.
“But I didn’t know that I had been giving you so much pain. I’m sorry—I’m ashamed—with all my heart. I ask your pardon.”
“Yes, yes! I know how you say all that. Oh, I know the superior stand you take! I know how you say to yourself, ‘It’s my business to treat her handsomely for Easton’s sake, whatever I think of her. Come, I’ll do the right thing, at any rate!’ You ask my pardon. Thanks, thanks; I give it in all meekness. Yes, let there be a truce between us. I can’t choose but be glad to be let alone. Will you walk on and leave me now, Mr. Gilbert, or let me leave you?”
“No, I can’t part from you so. Let it be peace, not a truce. I make no such reservations as you imagine. I beseech you to pardon my brutality and to forget my rudeness.”
She halted, and impulsively stretched out her hand toward him, and then suddenly withdrew it before he could take it. “Wait,” she said, seriously. “I can’t be friends with you yet, till I know whether you really think me worthy. If you don’t, you shall have no forgiveness of mine. You must be more than sorry that you hurt my feelings.”
“I will be as much sorry, and about as many things, as you like.”
“Oh, don’t try to turn it into a joke! You know what I mean. Did Mr. Easton tell you what I told him to say about the trouble between you? Did he lay the whole blame upon me? Did he say that I did it willfully and recklessly, because your friendship piqued me, and because—because—though I never thought of that before!—I was jealous of it?”
Gilbert did not smile at the slight confusion of ideas, but answered, gravely, “Easton was not the man to lay blame upon you—he would like it too well himself. Besides, I was unfair with him, and gave him no chance to speak in your defense.”
“Oh, how could you be so cruel as that? He was so true to you! I should think you never could forgive yourself for that. You ought to have heard him praise you. He told me everything. Yes, you did act grandly. But he could have done as much for you, and more, or he never would have suffered your self-sacrifice.”
“There is only one Easton in the world,” said Gilbert, gloomily; and he went on to talk of Easton’s character, his noble eccentricities, his beneficent life, and his heroic ideals. He spoke with a certain effect of self-compulsion very different from the light-hearted liking with which he had once before talked with her of Easton, but she listened reverently, and at the end she said with a sigh: “No, I see that I didn’t know him. Why, I hadn’t even imagined it! Why should he care for me?”