Eleven
months ago I left you because your pleasure and my own dignity
demanded it; to-day I put by all the joy and exaltation you offer,
because your position as a gentleman, and your happiness as a man
equally requires it."
"My happiness as a man!" he broke in. "Ah, Luttra if you love me as I
do you--"
"I might perhaps yield," she allowed with a faint smile. "But I love
you as a girl brought up amid surroundings from which her whole being
recoiled, must love the one who first brought light into her darkness
and opened up to her longing feet the way to a life of culture, purity
and honor. I were the basest of women could I consent to repay such
a boundless favor--"
"But Luttra," he again broke in, "you married me knowing what your
father and brother were capable of committing."
"Yes, yes; I was blinded by passion, a girl's passion, Mr. Blake, born
of glamour and gratitude; not the self-forgetting devotion of a woman
who has tasted the bitterness of life and so learned its lesson of
sacrifice. I may not have thought, certainly I did not realize, what
I was doing. Besides, my father and brother were not convicted
criminals at that time, however weak they had proved themselves under
temptation. And then I believed I had left them behind me on the road
of life; that we were sundered, irrevocably cut loose from all
possible connection.
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