She smiled at him again through her tears.  “Marcella,” he cried in distress, trying to lift her, to rise himself, “you can’t imagine that I should let you kneel to me!”

“You must,” she said steadily; “well, if it will make you happier, I will take a stool and sit by you.  But you are there above me—­I am at your feet—­it is the same chair, and you shall not move”—­she stooped in a hasty passion, as though atoning for her “shall,” and kissed his hand—­“till I have said it all—­every word!”

So she began it—­her long confession, from the earliest days.  He winced often—­she never wavered.  She carried through the sharpest analysis of her whole mind with regard to him; of her relations to him and Wharton in the old days; of the disloyalty and lightness with which she had treated the bond, that yet she had never, till quite the end, thought seriously of breaking; of her selfish indifference to, even contempt for, his life, his interests, his ideals; of her calm forecasts of a married state in which she was always to take the lead and always to be in the right—­then of the real misery and struggle of the Hurd trial.

“That was my first true experience,” she said; “it made me wild and hard, but it burnt, it purified.  I began to live.  Then came the day when—­when we parted—­the time in hospital—­the nursing—­the evening on the terrace.  I had been thinking of you—­because remorse made me think of you—­solitude—­Mr. Hallin—­everything.  I wanted you to be kind to me, to behave as though you had forgotten everything, because it would have made me comfortable and happy; or I thought it would.  And then, that night you wouldn’t be kind, you wouldn’t forget—­instead, you made me pay my penalty.”

She stared at him an instant, her dark brows drawn together, struggling to keep her tears back, yet lightening from moment to moment into a divine look of happiness.  He tried to take possession of her, to stop her, to silence all this self-condemnation on his breast.  But she would not have it; she held him away from her.

“That night, though I walked up and down the terrace with Mr. Wharton afterwards, and tried to fancy myself in love with him—­that night, for the first time, I began to love you!  It was mean and miserable, wasn’t it, not to be able to appreciate the gift, only to feel when it was taken away?  It was like being good when one is punished, because one must—­”

She laid down her head against his chair with a long sigh.  He could bear it no longer.  He lifted her in his arms, talking to her passionately of the feelings which had been the counterpart to hers, the longings, jealousies, renunciations—­above all, the agony of that moment at the Mastertons’ party.

“Hallin was the only person who understood,” he said; “he knew all the time that I should love you to my grave.  I could talk to him.”

She gave a little sob of joy, and pushing herself away from him an instant, she laid a hand on his shoulder.