“I wish I could. I know I am not hors de blâme, for I deceived you when I said I was under my uncle’s thrall. It is true he holds power over me, but not in the way I suggested.”
“How, then?”
“Ah, it is part of the secret. Some day, perhaps, you may know—not now. I had a set purpose in asking you to go to Russia to perform that commission you so kindly undertook, yet it was in desperation that I asked you—the man who was to have been my husband.”
“And I shall bitterly remember the experience until my dying day,” I remarked.
“Yes! it is only natural that you should feel disgusted at what you conceive is my treachery. It is but another result of the fatal step—I mean of the cursed circumstances in which I am placed. I cannot hope for your forgiveness, for I dare not explain. On every side,” she exclaimed disconsolately, with a vehement gesture of the hands, “I am watched and surrounded, hemmed in with difficulties, absolutely prevented from—”
“From telling me the object for which you sent me to Russia, when you knew it was a dangerous errand, likely to cost me my life? How can you expect that I should love you as I did with this terrible enigma unsolved?”
She remained silent.
For a moment I thought she was on the point of telling me all, when, with a look of piteous appeal, she threw herself at my knees and raised my hands to her lips.
“Frank,” she murmured, so low that it was only by bending forward that I could catch the words, “why do you ask? Is it because you love me, or—or—is it from mere curiosity you inquire?”
“Because I love you, Vera.”