She looked at him with a strange look; she pointed to
the newspaper crumpled in his hand with a strange gesture; she
spoke to him in a strange voice.
"You know it!" she said.
His eyes met hers--she shrank from them--turned--and laid her
arms and her head heavily against the wall.
"Oh, Alfred," she said, "I was so lonely in the world, and I was
so fond of you!"
The woman's delicacy, the woman's trembling tenderness welled up
from her heart, and touched her voice with a tone of its old
sweetness as she murmured those simple words.
She said no more. Her confession of her fault, her appeal to
their past love for pardon, were both poured forth in that one
sentence. She left it to his own heart to tell him the rest. How
anxiously her vigilant love had followed his every word and
treasured up his every opinion in the days when they first met;
how weakly and falsely, and yet with how true an affection for
him, she had shrunk from the disclosure which she knew but too
well would have separ ated them even at the church door; how
desperately she had fought against the coming discovery which
threatened to tear her from the bosom she clung to, and to cast
her out into the world with the shadow of her own shame to darken
her life to the end--all this she left him to feel; for the
moment which might part them forever was the moment when she knew
best how truly, how passionately he had loved her.
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