“It is true I cannot bear to picture you here,” he exclaimed. “The thought tortures me, but it is because I love you, because I wish to take and shield you. I am not a man to marry a woman without love. It seems to me that you should know me well enough to believe that, Honora. There never has been any other woman in my life, and there never can be. I have given you proof of it, God knows.”
“I am not what I was,” she said, “I am not what I was. I have been dragged down.”
He bent and lifted her hand from her knee, and raised it to his lips, a homage from him that gave her an exquisite pain.
“If you had been dragged down,” he answered simply, “my love would have been killed. I know something of the horrors you have been through, as though I had suffered them myself. They might have dragged down another woman, Honora. But they have strangely ennobled you.”
She drew her hand away.
“No,” she said, “I do not deserve happiness. It cannot be my destiny.”
“Destiny,” he repeated. “Destiny is a thing not understandable by finite minds. It is not necessarily continued tragedy and waste, of that I am certain. Only a little thought is required, it seems to me, to assure us that we cannot be the judges of our own punishment on this earth. And of another world we know nothing. It cannot be any one's destiny to throw away a life while still something may be made of it. You would be throwing your life away here. That no other woman is possible, or ever can be possible, for me should be a consideration with you, Honora. What I ask of you is a sacrifice—will you make me happy?”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Peter, do you care so much as that? If—if I could be sure that I were doing it for you! If in spite—of all that has happened to me, I could be doing something for you—!”
He stooped and kissed her.