“Mr. Belsky? It was the first night I saw him, and we were talking about Americans, and he began to tell me about an American friend of his, who was very conscientious. I thought it must be you the fust moment,” said Clementina, smiling with an impersonal pleasure in the fact.
“From the conscientiousness?” he asked, in bitter self-irony.
“Why, yes,” she returned, simply. “That was what made me think of you. And the last time when he began to talk about you, I couldn't stop him, although I knew he had no right to.”
“He had no right. But I gave him the power to do it! He meant no harm, but I enabled him to do all the harm.”
“Oh, if he's only alive, now, there is no harm!”
He looked into her eyes with a misgiving from which he burst impetuously. “Then you do care for me still, after all that I have done to make you detest me?” He started toward her, but she shrank back.
“I didn't mean that,” she hesitated.
“You know that I love you,—that I have always loved you?”
“Yes,” she assented. “But you might be sorry again that you had said it.” It sounded like coquetry, but he knew it was not coquetry.
“Never! I've wished to say it again, ever since that night at Middlemount; I have always felt bound by what I said then, though I took back my words for your sake. But the promise was always there, and my life was in it. You believe that?”