Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/315

 You see, she'd hoped and believed that you would spend the rest of your life in India. It was a great shock to learn you'd come home, and she'd have to meet you at once, or else perhaps rouse some suspicion that she wanted to avoid you. She had very little time to decide what to do; but, as she explained before I understood what was coming, she trusted to my affection for pardon. Her great love for me was to blame, but I could hardly reproach her for that. And we had lived for thirteen happy years together. I must remember these years, and what she had tried to be to me always, and so not to be too angry, but forgive her.

That was the preamble, and I had no inkling yet of what was to come. Only, I said to myself: 'Poor girl, she little knows how far from happy those years have been to me. At best (though I've none but the kindliest feeling toward her) my life by her side has been just endurable. There's all the difference between happiness and resignation that there is between a dull gray sky and a blue one, radiant with sunshine.'

"I thought that, but I meant to keep the thought from her, as I always had. A few minutes later, however, I blurted it out, with tremendous consequences. God forgive me! I can never forgive myself."

"Go on from the place where you left off," Terry's gentle voice soothed him again, like rain as it falls upon a parched desert.

"Well, we were by way of being distant cousins;