Page:Hegan Rice--Mrs Wiggs of the cabbage patch.djvu/48

  had been given me in which to make a man of myself."

As he finished speaking he saw, for the first time, that Lucy was crying. He sprang forward, but she shrank away. "No, no, don't touch me! I'm so terribly disappointed, and hurt, and—stunned."

"But you surely don't love me the less for having conquered these things in the past?"

"I don't know, I don't know," she said, with a sob. "I honored and idealized you, Robert. I can never think of you as being other than you are now."

"But why should you?" he pleaded. "It was only one year out of my life; too much, it's true, but I have atoned for it with all my might."

The intensity and earnestness of his voice were beginning to influence her