“That,” he said, “is something for which God forbid that I should take credit.  What you are is due to the development of a germ within you, a development in which I have always had faith.  I came here to see you, I came here because I love you, because I have always loved you, Honora.”

“Oh, no, not that!” she cried; “not that!”

“Why not?” he asked.  “It is something I cannot help, something beyond my power to prevent if I would.  But I would not.  I am proud of it, and I should be lost without it.  I have had it always.  I have come over to beg you to marry me.”

“It’s impossible!  Can’t you see it’s impossible?”

“You don’t love me?” he said.  Into those few words was thrown all the suffering of his silent years.

“I don’t know what I feel for you,” she answered in an agonized voice, her fingers tightening over the backs of her white hands.  “If reverence be love—­if trust be love, infinite and absolute trust—­if gratitude be love—­if emptiness after you are gone be a sign of it—­yes, I love you.  If the power to see clearly only through you, to interpret myself only by your aid be love, I acknowledge it.  I tell you so freely, as of your right to know.  And the germ of which you spoke is you.  You have grown until you have taken possession of—­of what is left of me.  If I had only been able to see clearly from the first, Peter, I should be another woman to-day, a whole woman, a wise woman.  Oh, I have thought of it much.  The secret of life was there at my side from the time I was able to pronounce your name, and I couldn’t see it.  You had it.  You stayed.  You took duty where you found it, and it has made you great.  Oh, I don’t mean to speak in a worldly sense.  When I say that, it is to express the highest human quality of which I can think and feel.  But I can’t marry you.  You must see it.”

“I cannot see it,” he replied, when he had somewhat gained control of himself.

“Because I should be wronging you.”

“How?” he asked.

“In the first place, I should be ruining your career.”

“If I had a career,” he said, smiling gently, “you couldn’t ruin it.  You both overestimate and underestimate the world’s opinion, Honora.  As my wife, it will not treat you cruelly.  And as for my career, as you call it, it has merely consisted in doing as best I could the work that has come to me.  I have tried to serve well those who have employed me, and if my services be of value to them, and to those who may need me in the future, they are not going to reject me.  If I have any worth in the world, you will but add to it.  Without you I am incomplete.”

She looked up at him wonderingly.

“Yes, you are great,” she said.  “You pity me, you think of my loneliness.”

“It is true I cannot bear to picture you here,” he exclaimed.  “The thought tortures me, but it is because I love you, because I wish to take and shield you.  I am not a man to marry a woman without love.  It seems to me that you should know me well enough to believe that, Honora.  There never has been any other woman in my life, and there never can be.  I have given you proof of it, God knows.”