“In fact, I know I could make you happy.”
“Louis, have you forgotten?” she cried in sharp pain.
“I have forgotten nothing,” he replied incisively. “Listen to me, Ruth. It is because I remember that I ask you. Give me the right to care for you, and you will be happier than you can ever be in these circumstances.”
“You do not know what you ask, Louis. Even if I could, you would never be satisfied.”
She raised herself from her easy, reclining position, and regarded him earnestly.
“What you desire,” she said in a restrained manner, “would be little short of a crime for me. What manner of wife should I be to you when my every thought is given to another?”
His face put on the set look of one who has shut his teeth hard together.
“I anticipated this repulse,” he said after a pause; “so what you have just assured me of does not affect my wish or my resolution to continue my plea.”
“Would you marry a woman who feels herself as closely bound to another, or the memory of another, as if the marriage rite had been actually performed? Oh, Louis, how could you force me to these disclosures?”
“I am seeking no disclosure, but it is impossible for me to continue silent now.”
They sat so close together he might have touched her by putting out his hand, but he remained perfectly still, only the pale excitement of long repression speaking from his face; but she shrank back at his words and raised her hand as if about to receive a blow.
“Do not be alarmed,” he continued, noticing the action; “my love cannot hurt you, or it would have killed you long ago.”
“Oh, Louis,” she murmured, “forgive me; I never thought you cared so much.”
“How should you? I am not a man to wear my heart upon my sleeve. I think I have always loved you; but living as familiarly as we have lived, seeing you whenever I wished, the thought that some day this might end never occurred to me. It was only when the possibility of some other man’s claiming your love and taking you from me presented itself, that my heart rose up in arms against it,--and then I asked you to be my wife.”
“Yes,” she replied, raising her pale face; “and I refused. The same cause that moved me then, and to which you submitted without protest, rules me now, and you know it.”