“I expected you to marry me!  I expected you to forgive.  I have this at least to remember:  I lost you honestly when I could have won you falsely.”

“Ah, you have no right to seek any happiness in what is all sadness to me!  And all the sadness, the ruin of everything, comes from your wrong-doing.”

“Remember that my wrong-doing did not begin with me.  I bear my share:  it is enough:  I will bear no more.”

A long silence followed.  She spoke at last, checking her tears: 

“And so this is the end of my dream!  This is what life has brought me to!  And what have I done to deserve it?  To leave home, to shun friends, to dread scandal, to be misjudged, to bear the burden of your secret and share with you its shame, to see my years stretch out before me with no love in them, no ambitions, no ties—­this is what life has brought me, and what have I done to deserve it?”

As her tears ceased, her eyes seemed to be looking into a future that lacked the relief of tears.  As though she were already passed far on into it and were looking back to this moment, she went on, speaking very slowly and sadly: 

“We shall not see each other again in a long time, and whenever we do, we shall be nothing to each other and we shall never speak of this.  There is one thing I wish to tell you.  Some day you may have false thoughts of me.  You may think that I had no deep feeling, no constancy, no mercy, no forgiveness; that it was easy to give you up, because I never loved you.  I shall have enough to bear and I cannot bear that.  So I want to tell you that you will never know what my love for you was.  A woman cannot speak till she has the right; and before you gave me the right, you took it away.  For some little happiness it may bring me hereafter let me tell you that you were everything to me, everything!  If I had taught myself to make allowances for you, if I had seen things to forgive in you, what you told me would have been only one thing more and I might have forgiven.  But all that I saw in you I loved.  Rowan, and I believed that I saw everything.  Remember this, if false thoughts of me ever come to you!  I expect to live a long time:  the memory of my love of you will be the sorrow that will keep me alive.”

After a few moments of silent struggle she moved nearer.

“Do not touch me,” she said; “remember that what love makes dear, it makes sacred.”

She put out a hand in the darkness and, closing her eyes over welling tears, passed it for long remembrance over his features:  letting the palm lie close against his forehead with her fingers in his hair; afterward pressing it softly over his eyes and passing it around his neck.  Then she took her hand away as though fearful of an impulse.  Then she put her hand out again and laid her fingers across his lips.  Then she took her hand away, and leaning over, laid her lips on his lips: