“John!” she whispered, and put out gentle fingers and caressed his hair.

He shivered and let his hands fall from his haggard face.

“Darling,” he said, “I am not worthy to touch the hem of your garment.  Why do you not turn from such a weakling and brute?”

“Hush!  Hush,” she exclaimed, aghast.  “You must not speak so of yourself.  I love you always, as you know, and I cannot hear him whom I love abused.”

And now he looked into her eyes while he took her slender hand, and there he saw the same wells of purity and devotion brimming with divine faith and tenderness that he had last seen glistening with happy love.

He folded her to his heart; the passionate emotion each was feeling was too deep, too sacred for words; and then their eyes streamed with scorching tears.

They sat thus close for some seconds.  The thirst and hunger of all these days of rack and anguish must be assuaged before either could talk.  But at last she drew a little back and looked up into his face.

“John,” she said softly, “I read in an English paper a week ago that your wedding was fixed for the seventh of October—­my birthday.  Is it the truth?”

He clasped his hands in agony.

“It can never now be so,” he said.  “I cannot, I will not go through with it.  Oh, Halcyone, my darling one, you would pity me, although you would despise me, if you knew—­”

“I could never despise you,” she answered, nestling once more in his arms.  “John, for me nothing you could do would make any difference—­you would still be my love; and if you were weak I would make you strong, and if cold and hungry, I would feed and comfort you, and if wicked, I would only see you good.”

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he said, “you were always as an angel of sweetness.  Listen to the whole degrading story, and tell me then of that which I must do.”

She took one of his hands and held it in both of hers; and it was as if some stream of comfort flowed to him through their soft warm touch and enabled him to begin his ugly task.

He told her the whole thing from the beginning.  Of his ambitions, and how they held chief place in his life, and how he had meant to marry Cecilia Cricklander as an aid to their advancement.  He glossed over nothing of his own baseness, but went on to show how, from the moment he had seen her upon that Good Friday at the orchard house, his determination about Cecilia Cricklander had begun to waver, until the night under the tree when passion overcame every barrier and he knew he must possess her—­Halcyone—­for his wife.

He made no excuse for himself; he continued the plain tale of how, his ambitions still holding him, he had selfishly tried to keep both joy and them, by asking her—­she who was so infinitely above him—­to descend to the invidious position of a secret wife.

She knew the rest until it came to the cause of his accident, and, when she heard it occurred because of his haste to get to her before she should reach the house, she gave a little moan of anguish and leaned her head against his breast.