“I thought you would never come,” I answered.

He rose and walked hurriedly up and down the room, then paused in front of me and said—­his words seem burned into my brain—­“You are a woman who deserves frankness, and I will be utterly and absolutely frank with you.  I have done very wrong in behaving as I have done.  I had no right, no justification, for it, and I beg you to forgive me—­humbly I beg it on my knees;” and he knelt before me.

I was bewildered and pained beyond measure.  I thought I knew not what, but a tissue of wild absurdities rushed through my brain to account for his words—­anything rather than think he did not love me.

“With many women this confession would be unnecessary,” he went on.  “You are genuine and simple, and attach a real meaning to every word and act, because you do not yourself speak or act without meaning.  How can I, then, part from you without asking your forgiveness for what I have said and done?”

“Part from me!” I exclaimed, holding out my hands to him:  he had risen now.  “Oh, Mr. Lawrence, let us be frank with one another.  There is no need to part.  Do you think your poverty is any barrier between us?  It is but an added bond.  Can I not work too?  And we will learn to think alike where we now differ.  Why should we part?  We love each other.  Why should we not marry?  What can part us but our own wills?  I love you, you know it, and I think you love me; at least I am sure I could teach you to love me.”  He stood while I spoke, his arms hanging by his sides.  What more I said I hardly know.  I think—­I am sure, indeed—­I told him, standing there, how I loved him.  I felt I must speak it once to one human being.  A great foresight came to me:  I seemed to see my life stretching before me, long, lonely, desolate:  no other love like this could come, full well I knew that, and I could not enter on that dreary path without setting free my soul.  Yes, I spoke out to him.  Words of power they were—­power and fire and longing.  Perhaps I alone, of all women, have told a man of my love when I knew it to be hopeless.  My hope had died when he first spoke.  Had he loved me, he had spoken otherwise.  That I was woman enough to see; but if it be unwomanly to feel in every pulse-throb the need of expression, to know that I should die of suppressed passion, tenderness, love, if I did not speak it all, did not tell him once how I loved him, how I could have lived his servant, his slave, happy and content—­how his smile seemed the sun and his caresses heaven to me—­how I was hungry with the hunger of my very soul to spend on him the garnered treasure of my heart,—­if this be unwomanly, I was indeed unsexed.  I seemed exalted out of myself, and full of power.

He heard me, and it moved him.  He spoke again when I had finished.  He had not lifted his eyes to mine, and did not then.  He said, “I could not marry you:  it would be the worst possible thing for both of us.  Your life would be miserable—­mine most wretched.  You must see that there are other things in life besides love, and other things which influence its happiness.  Everything would separate us except our personal affinity.  Our education, our ideas, beliefs, our past lives, our aims for the future, make a gulf between us.  We could never bridge it,” He paused.