Lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of her incredulity.  “You might at least have told me—­have explained.  Do you think I shouldn’t have understood?”

He did not hesitate.  “You would have understood.  It wasn’tthat.”

“What was it then?” she quavered.

“It’s wonderful you shouldn’t see!  Simply that I couldn’t write you that.  Anything else—­not that!”

“And so you preferred to let me suffer?”

There was a shade of reproach in his eyes.  “I suffered too,” he said.

It was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment it nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent them trembling in the direction of scorn and irony.  Buteven as the impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation.  Once again, as so often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always failed to reckon with—­the fact of thedeep irreducible difference between his image in her mind and hisactual self, the mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality.  She had phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to herself that she “never could rememberhim,” so completely did the sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders.  Bright and breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside which her private injury paled.

“I suffered horribly,” he repeated, “and all the more that Icouldn’t make a sign, couldn’t cry out my misery.  There was onlyone escape from it all—­to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me.”

The blood rushed to Lizzie’s forehead.  “Hate you—­you prayed that I might hate you?”

He rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in his.  “Yes; because your letters showed me that, if youdidn’t, you’d be unhappier still.”

Her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it, and her thoughts, too—­her poor fluttering stormy thoughts—­felt themselves suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of communion.

“And I meant to keep my resolve,” he went on, slowly releasing his clasp.  “I meant to keep it even after the random stream of things swept me back here in your way; but when I saw you the other day, I felt that what had been possible at a distance was impossible now that we were near each other.  How was it possibleto see you and want you to hate me?”

He had moved away, but not to resume his seat.  He merely paused at a little distance, his hand resting on a chair-back, inthe transient attitude that precedes departure.

Lizzie’s heart contracted.  He was going, then, and this washis farewell.  He was going, and she could find no word to detainhim but the senseless stammer “I never hated you.”