“So I feared. What do you hope to gain by so doing?”
“I will gain work, and rest—and peace.”
“No, Margaret, you will not gain peace. Listen to me. I know you better than you know yourself! You will find work, you may find rest, of a kind, but what peace will come to you even though you are shut in safe from the chance evils of life, when you think of one who has loved as faithfully, but without the same hope as yourself, wandering, a broken man, because you refused him admittance to the happiness you alone could offer.”
“Do you think it fair to try me by such an appeal? You know I can never be indifferent to your fate. You know I have thought for you even above myself,” she said, with a tremor in her voice she could not entirely suppress.
I saw my advantage, and seized it eagerly. “Then, Margaret, listen! Listen while I plead for myself. What have I to look forward to, if I lose you? Behind me are the best years of my life, wasted in this wilderness because I had hoped to secure your happiness by my exile. To-day I have seen every hope of my advancement vanish; that I can take as one of the chances of war—but what have I left if I lose you now? You are the whole world to me, and all it can offer is nothing, if it does not include you. Margaret, my love! Call back the day when, if I could have spoken, love waited in your heart to answer. Give me a single hour of that past now! a moment of the old love in which to plead for your life as well as my own.”
Her colour came and went as I spake; she had visibly lost that control which had so far baffled me, and when she answered, it was with the familiar name she had not uttered, save when she had been surprised into it on our first meeting.
“Oh, Hugh, do not try me. You know not what I have gone through, and now I am near to God.”
“Margaret, my darling, you will be nearer God when you are beside the man to whom He would confide you. You know I love you with all my soul! How can you look for happiness apart from him whom you have loved so long, and whom you love even now!” I ended, determined to risk the utmost. “Come to me, Margaret! Come to me! We will face life together, and together there will be no room for further doubtings, for further mistakes! I cannot shape my love into words. It is all my life, all my being, and yet it is a poor thing to offer you.”
“Oh, Hugh, I know not which way to turn.”
“Turn to me, Margaret! Turn to me! If ever a man needed a good woman's love, I need yours now. Everything is falling about me. I may have no right to ask, but I cannot help it. My need is greater than my strength. Am I to go forth into exile again without you-Margaret?”