Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/160

152 felt that I have loved you, felt it in every vein. To me you have not grown old, but have remained the same, only there was this shadow of a great darkness between us. I constrained myself, because I considered you had sinned against God and me, and were unworthy of being loved!"

Again he drew her head to his shoulder, laid it there, and kissed her, and sobbed, and clasped her passionately.

"Marianne! Let him that is without guilt cast the first stone. I forgive you. Tell me that you loved me when I came to you asking you to be mine."

"I did love you, Stephen—you and you only."

"And that other; he who—" he did not finish the sentence—a fresh fit of trembling came on him.

"I never did love him, Stephen. Only his title and his position impressed me. I was young, and he was so much my superior in age, in rank, in strength; and the prospect opened before me was so splendid, that a poor, young, trustful, foolish thing like me—"

"You did not love him?" Stephen spoke with eagerness.

"I have assured you that I never did."

"Oh the age that we have spent together under one roof, united yet separated; one in name, apart in soul; years of sorrow to both of us; years of estrangement; years of disappointed love, and broken trust, and embittered home—all this we owe to him!"

Marianne felt his heart beating furiously, and his muscles contracting spasmodically in his face, that was against hers, in his breast, in his arms.

Has it ever chanced to the reader to encounter a married couple blind to each other's faults, and these faults glaring? One might suppose that daily intercourse would have sharpened the perception of each other's weaknesses, but instead of that it blunts it. They cannot detect in each other the grotesque, the ugly, the false, that are conspicuous