Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/416

 said with melancholy bitterness, "you deceive me no longer now! You own that, when here we stood last and exchanged our troth, you in the blossom, and I in the prime, of life--you own that it was no woman's love, deaf to all calumny, proof to all craft that could wrong the absent; no woman's love, warm as the heart, undying as the soul, that you pledged me then?"

"Darrell, it was not--though then I thought it was."

"Ay, ay," he continued with a smile, as if of triumph in his own pangs, "so that truth is confessed at last! And when, once more free, you wrote to me the letter I returned, rent in fragments, to your hand--or when, forgiving my rude outrage and fierce reproach, you spoke to me so gently yonder, a few weeks since, in these lonely shades, then what were your sentiments, your motives? Were they not those of a long-suppressed and kind remorse? of a charity akin to that which binds rich to poor, bows happiness to suffering?--some memories of gratitude--nay, perhaps of childlike affection?--all amiable, all generous, all steeped in that sweetness of nature to which I unconsciously rendered justice in the anguish I endured in losing you; but do not tell me that even then you were under the influence of woman's love."

"Darrell, I was not."

"You own it, and you suffer me to see you again! Trifler and cruel one, is it but to enjoy the sense of your undiminished, unalterable power?"

"Alas, Darrell! alas! why am I here?--why so yearning, yet so afraid to come? Why did my heart fail when these trees rose in sight against the sky?--why, why--why was it drawn hither by the spell I could not resist? Alas, Darrell, alas! I am a woman now--and--and this--"

She lowered her veil, and turned away; her lips could not utter the word, because the word was not pity, not remorse, not remembrance, not even affection; and the woman loved now too well to subject to the hazard of rejection--LOVE!

"Stay, oh stay!" cried Darrell. "Oh that I could dare to ask you to complete the sentence! I know--I know by the mysterious sympathy of my own soul, that you could never deceive me more! Is it--is it--"

His lips falter too; but her hand is clasped in his; her head is reclining upon his breast; the veil is withdrawn from the sweet downcast