I--"
"Wait," suddenly exclaimed she, reaching out her hand for her fan with
a gesture lofty as it was resolute. "You have spoken a word which
demands explanation; what have I ever done to you that you should
speak the word recrimination to me?"
"What? You shook my faith in womankind; you showed me that a woman who
had once told a man she loved him, could so far forget that love as
to marry one she could never respect, for the sake of titles and
jewels. You showed me--"
"Hold," said she again, this time without gesture or any movement,
save that of her lips grown pallid as marb!e[sic], "and what did you
show me?"
He started, colored profoundly, and for a moment stood before her
unmasked of his stern self-possession. "I beg your pardon," said he,
"I take back that word, recrimination."
It was now her turn to lift her head and survey him. With glance less
cool than his, but fully as deliberate, she looked at his proud head
bending before her; studying his face, line by line, from the stern
brow to the closely compressed lips on which melancholy seemed to have
set its everlasting seal, and a change passed over her countenance.
"Holman," said she, with a sudden rush of tenderness, "if in the times
gone by, we both behaved with too much worldly prudence for it now to
be any great pleasure for either of us to look back, is that any
reason why we should mar our whole future by dwelling too long upon
what we are surely still young enough to bury if not forget? I
acknowledge that I would have behaved in a more ideal fashion, if,
after I had been forsaken by you, I had turned my face from society,
and let the canker-worm of despair slowly destroy whatever life and
bloom I had left.
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