Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/153

Rh "Have you forgotten?" she asks below her breath. "Do you find it so easy?"

"God knows!" he says, lifting his head and staring up at the sky, that is so "thick inlaid with patines of bright gold." "Women don't feel things as men do."

"Do they not?" she cries, with a fierce jangle in her sweet voice. "Have you forgotten that it is the one who sins, not the one who is sinned against, that suffers the most keenly? Do you think that if it had been through your fault or folly I lost my happiness I should have mourned half as heavily as I do now, knowing that it is my own doing?"

"Why did you do it?" he says, looking down on her with an infinite yearning in his eyes, an infinite agony in his voice. "We could have been so happy "

"You were too hard upon me," she says, with a shuddering moan. "Any other man would have forgiven me—if he had loved me."

"And did not I love you?" he asks, quietly.

"You cast me off," she says, lifting her lovely face to his; "I did not you."

"I never loved, never wanted any woman but you," he says, slowly. "I chose you out of the whole world for my wife. I would have worn you as my fairest honour, my priceless pearl; and how did you reward me?"

"I was never unfaithful to you," she says, drearily. "If ever I did anything wrong it was before I knew you."

"And there it was that you deceived me," he says, with a heavy sigh. You had seemed so pure, and honest, and true."

"And so I was to you," she says swiftly—"always true to you!"

"Heavens!" he says, throwing back his head with a quick, sudden gesture, "when I think of it all! It was much such a