I brooded desperately.  I could conceive an overlooking height that made her utterance simple and consecutive:  I could not reach it.  Topics which to me were palpitating, had no terror for her.  She said, ’I have offended my father; I have written to him; he will take me away.’  In speaking of the letter which had caused her to offend, she did not blame the writer.  I was suffered to run my eyes over it, and was ashamed.  It read to me too palpably as an outcry to delude and draw her hither:—­pathos and pathos:  the father holding his dying son in his arms, his sole son, Harry Richmond; the son set upon by enemies in the night:  the lover never daring to beg for a sight of his beloved ere he passed away:—­not an ill-worded letter; read uncritically, it may have been touching:  it must have been, though it was the reverse for me.  I frowned, broke down in regrets, under sharp humiliation.

She said, ’You knew nothing of it.  A little transgression is the real offender.  When we are once out of the way traced for us, we are in danger of offending at every step; we are as lawless as the outcasts.’  That meant, ‘My turning aside to you originally was the blameable thing.’  It might mean, ’My love of you sets my ideas of duty at variance with my father’s.’

She smiled; nothing was uttered in a tone of despondency.  Her high courage and breeding gave her even in this pitfall the smoothness which most women keep for society.  Why she had not sent me any message or tidings of herself to Riversley was not a matter that she could imagine to perplex me:  she could not imagine my losing faith in her.  The least we could do, I construed it, the religious bond between us was a faith in one another that should sanctify to our souls the external injuries it caused us to commit.  But she talked in no such strain.  Her delight in treading English ground was her happy theme.  She said, ’It is as young as when we met in the forest’; namely, the feeling revived for England.  How far off we were from the green Devonshire coast, was one of her questions, suggestive of our old yacht-voyage lying among her dreams.  Excepting an extreme and terrorizing paleness, there was little to fever me with the thought that she suffered mortally.  Of reproach, not a word; nor of regret.  At the first touch of hands, when we stood together, alone, she said, ‘Would hearing of your recovery have given me peace?’ My privileges were the touch of hands, the touch of her fingers to my lips, a painless hearing and seeing, and passionate recollection.  She said, ‘Impatience is not for us, Harry’:  I was not to see her again before the evening.  These were the last words she said, and seemed the lightest until my hot brain made a harvest of them transcending thrice-told vows of love.  Did they not mean, ‘We two wait’:  therefore, ’The years are bondmen to our stedfastness.’  Could sweeter have been said?  They might mean nothing!