“And yet how I have loved you, Elizabeth!—­more dearly than my life,” he added.

She still remained for a moment silent, and had to summon all her courage now to speak.  At last she said, in a rather strained voice, and without lifting her eyes—­

“I hear you say it, Salve.  But I have been thinking a good deal lately.”

“You have been thinking, Elizabeth?” he repeated, “what have you been thinking?” and his expression changed in a moment to the dark, stern one she knew so well.  He had made his advance; further he would not go.

“Am I right, or am I not?” he asked, sharply.

“No, Salve, you are not right,” she replied, turning to him now with a look that seemed fired by all she had endured; “you are not right.  It is yourself, and yourself only, you have loved all along; and when you took me as your wife, you merely took another to help you.  There were two about it then, and even so it was not enough.  No! no!” she cried, striking out her hand with an emphatic gesture in the bitterness of her feeling—­“if you had loved me as I have loved you, we would not be standing before one another as we are this day!”

He was taken aback for a moment by this unexpected outburst, but replied in a cold hard voice, while his eyes never moved from her face, “I thank you, Elizabeth, for having at last told me your thoughts, though it comes a little late.  You see I was right when I said that you had not been frank towards me.”

“I have not been frank with you, you say?  Yes, that is true,” she rejoined, while her eye met his unflinchingly.  “And it is to my honour.  I have submitted to be an object of suspicion in my own house.  I have shut my eyes and persisted in believing that you cared for me, in spite of the heavier burden which you were every day imposing upon me—­in spite of all that I have had to endure—­and it has been much, very much, Salve,—­and I have done all this because I believed it was my duty, and because I thought you could not bear to hear the truth, and because I hoped that I might conquer in the end, and make you really love me as I have all along, and but too well, loved you, Salve.  It is true that I have not been frank with you.  And, I repeat, it is to my honour.”

This interpretation of their relations together was not one which he chose to accept, and he rejoined in the same hard tone as before—­

“However cleverly you may have tried to conceal it, Elizabeth, it has always been but too evident to me what you have endured in trying to accommodate yourself to the humble circumstances of a man like me.  I know as well as you that a common seaman was little suited to be your husband—­I have always known it from the time we were first engaged, when we stood before Van Spyck’s portrait in Amsterdam.  That was the sort of man, I knew very well, whom you ought to have had for a husband.  I saw it again, as I have seen it always, when you made comparisons between the North Star and my poor brig—­”