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Rh the 'Unfinished' for you would imply that I was never disappointing."

"You could only disappoint me by doubting my love for you," he said.

That would have been enough; unfortunately, he completed the sentiment.

"Or by making it possible for me to doubt yours," he added.

That was tiresome; Lucia had to think very rapidly and very intently before she replied. Then she withdrew her hand.

"Edgar!" she said, with an excellent suspicion of tremolo.

He softened a little, but he still felt that his reply had been just.

"But, my darling, what was it you said to me? That you could not imagine being more to me than the third verse of some dreadful vulgar song. What am I to gather from that? Surely that you believe that my love for you is not the wonderful thing it is. You make out that the very foundations of our life are unsound."

Anxious as she was to close this rift without delay, she could not help mentally criticizing what he said. It was like him—oh, so like him!—to say "a dreadful vulgar song." He had to put that in. Then she attacked the main question with extreme adroitness.

"I imply nothing of the sort," she said, speaking quickly. "I have told you already what I meant. I never doubted your love for me. It is left for you to do that, if you choose. I only wondered—as I told you—how it can be possible that I should inspire it."

She could not have done better than to seem deeply hurt. That appealed not only to his love, but to his manhood. So she forgave him, and promised that the thing should pass out of her memory, and be as if it had never been. It had not been he who had spoken.

But for him now, as well as for her, a cloud had risen on the horizon. Just for the moment, in this renewed sunshine, it was invisible, but it was there, and some day it would quite certainly appear again. Just now he could with all sincerity accept his wife's explanation of what had so wounded him, for, indeed, it was admirably reasonable. But that which she had explained so well had gone deeper than her explanation of it. She had but smeared paint over the rift. But he did not know that now.