“And I?” she asked, reproachfully.  “Would it contribute to my happiness, do you think, to remember the sorrow and suffering which I was not allowed to share?”

“Could you not forget?”

“Never!”

The young man sprang to his feet abruptly, his face working with emotion, and took two or three turns about the room.  At last he paused, directly in front of her, and, folding his arms, stood looking down into the beautiful eyes that met his own so unflinchingly.  He was outwardly calm, but the smouldering fire which seemed to gleam in his dark eyes told of intense mental excitement.

“Miss Carleton,” he said, slowly, in low tones, but yet which vibrated through her whole being, “you are almost cruel in your kindness; you will yet make a coward of me!”

“I have no fear of that,” she answered, quietly.

“Yes, a coward!  Instead of remaining silent as I intended, and keeping my trouble within my own breast, you will compel me in self-defence to say that which will only give you pain to hear, thereby adding to my own suffering.”

“Perhaps you misjudge,” she replied, and her voice had a ring of pathos in it; “any word of explanation — no matter what — would be less hard for me to endure than this suspense.”

“God knows I would make full explanation if I could, but I cannot, and I fear there is nothing I can say that will not add to your suspense.  Miss Carleton, you must need no words from me to tell you that I love you.  I have loved you almost from the first day of our meeting, and whatever life may have in store for me, you, and you alone, will have my love.  But, loving you as I do, could I have looked forward to the present time, could I for one moment have foreseen what was awaiting me, believe me, you should never have known by word or look, or any other sign, of my love.”

He paused a moment, then continued.  “If that were all, I might have borne it; I could have locked my love forever within my own heart, and suffered in silence; but the fact that you have given me some reason to believe that you were not wholly indifferent to me, — the thought that I might in time have won your love, — makes the possibilities of the future a thousand times harder to bear.  It is harder to forego the joys of Paradise when once you have had a glimpse within!  It was to this I alluded when I spoke of the insurmountable barrier placed between myself and all that I hold holiest and best on earth!”

“But I do not understand!” she cried, her lovely color deepening and her eyes glowing with a new light, until Harold Mainwaring confessed to himself that never had he seen her so beautiful.  “What barrier could ever exist between you and me?”

For an instant he looked at her in silence, an agony of love and longing in his eyes; then drawing himself up to his full height, he said, slowly,-

“Not until I can stand before you free and clear from the faintest shadow of the murder of Hugh Mainwaring, will I ever ask for that most precious gift of your love!”