“Tell me now,” I urged. “You wish me to leave you without a single word of hope. You give me a negative reply without reason or explanation.”
“I have a reason,” she answered in a low, mechanical tone, a voice quite unusual to her.
“What is it?”
“I am a stern fatalist in principle and in action,” she responded.
“And is it that which prevents you from reciprocating my affection?”
“No,” she answered, shaking her head sadly, and glancing at her rings. “I know that happiness can never more come to me. To love would only be to increase my burden of remorse.”
“Remorse?” I cried, in a moment recollecting all the mysterious past.
“Yes,” she answered in a hard tone of melancholy and despair. “A remorse that arises from the pang of a wounded conscience, the recoil of the violated feelings of my nature, a horror of the ghastly past, a torture of self-condemnation strong as my soul, deep as my guilt, fatal as my resolve, and terrible as my crime.”
“Your crime!” I gasped.
She had at last confessed. I sat gazing at her absolutely dumbfounded. My brain seemed dead in me.