has never been a father like him:  my happiness stood between him and ruin—­ah, not mine alone, but yours—­and I sacrificed them!  If you knew all you would forgive me the wrong I did, great as it was.  I think now, if the time were to come over again, that—­yes, I should have to do it!” he broke out.  “I could not have stood by and seen-him ruined and disgraced without stretching out my hand to save him.”

“It was for your father’s sake?” she said, almost inaudibly.

“Yes,” he responded, grimly.  “And it saved him—­saved his good name, at any rate.  The rest went—­you have heard?”

She made a gesture of assent.  He drew a long breath, and held out his hand to her.

“Can you not forgive me, Ida?  If you knew what the sacrifice cost me, how much I have suffered.  She here, dearest”—­he drew still closer to her—­“let the past go.  It shall, I swear!  There is a limit to a man’s endurance, and I have passed it.  I love you, Ida, I want you!  Come back with me and let us live for each other, live for love.  Dearest, I will teach you to forget the wrong I did you.  It’s very little I have to offer you, a share in the hard life of a farmer out there in the wilds; but if you were still the mistress of Herondale, instead of poor—­”

Half unconsciously she broke in upon his prayer.

“I am still—­what I was.  I am not poor.  My father was a rich man when he died.”

Stafford regarded her with surprise, then he moved his hand, as if he were waving away the suggestion of an obstacle.

“I am glad—­for your sake, dearest; though for my own I would almost rather that you were as poor as I thought you; that I might work for you.  Why do you stand and look at me so hopelessly.  What else is there to divide us, dearest?”

Her lips opened, and almost inaudibly she breathed: 

“Your honour.”

He winced and set his teeth hard.

“My honour!”

“Yes.  You have pledged your word, you have made your bargain—­the price was paid, I suppose; you say so.  Then in honour you belong to—­her.”

The colour flamed in his face and his eyes grew hot.

“You cast me off—­you drive me back to her!” he said, scarcely knowing what he said.

“Yes!” she responded, faintly.  “You belong to her—­to her only.  Not to me, ah, not to me!  No, no, do not come near me, do not touch me!  I had forgotten—­I was mad!—­but I have remembered, I am sane now.”

Driven almost beyond himself by the sudden revulsion from joy and hope to doubt and despair, racked by the swift stemming of his passion, Stafford’s unreasoning anger rose against her:  it is always so with the man.

“My God!  You send me away—­to her!  You—­you do it coolly, easily enough!  Perhaps you have some other reason—­someone has stepped into my place—­”

It was a cruel thing to say, even in his madness.  For a moment she cowered under it, then she raised her white face and looked straight into his eyes.