Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/455

 "I wish I could believe you," he said.

"You need not. Why should you?" she answered. "I have nothing left to give you. What is a love worth that helped me to betray you?"

"And are you still glad you did it?" He had taken her hands firmly now, that he might look into her eyes. There was no tenderness there, only a desperate heart-broken defiance.

"Am I glad of anything? Can I ever be glad of anything any more? It is only that I would do it again for the same reason. And yet I did not get the thing for which I paid such a heavy price."

"Will you tell me what the thing was?"

"It was only," she answered, "that I thought that treachery the price of my baby's life—and now my baby is dead."

She drew her hands away from his as she spoke. There had come into her eyes a grief that awed and restrained him. He could see that it had nothing to do with himself. Her tone was very quiet.

It seemed to leave him at a great distance from her. For a moment he felt that he had got his answer, and could speak of love to her no more in the presence of such a sorrow. Then his courage came back, and with it resolution. If he was sure enough of his own love for her he could not fail in the end to drive away both her sorrow and her remorse.

"I have been cruel to you," he said; "can you forgive me?"

"I?" she answered, tremulously; "how can I forgive you?"

"Because I have been a fool, and quarrelled with my own happiness." And then he added, speaking slowly, "The story was a part of your own life. You had a right to do what you wished with it. At least, you can make it a part of your life if you will be more generous to me than I was to you."

She let him take her hands again. She looked into his eyes searchingly. What she saw there seemed to satisfy her, for she answered irrelevantly, "Oh, I have been so lonely. To live in the world with nothing but myself and your contempt! You cannot guess what it was like."

"Will you live in the world with me and my love, and see if you like it better?"

She had been too long without happiness to fight against it now, and her answer ended his trouble and hers.