His breath came quickly, and his wide-opened eyes were fixed on the western sky, and caught its golden light.
“Of course there was a struggle,” he resumed, “for I was sincere. But that is over. My unreasonable affection for you is as thoroughly eradicated as if it had never been a part of my life. I am ashamed of having so given myself up to it.”
Edith hesitated, then put the test. “Dick, I must be satisfied that I am really free. If you were sure now that no other, deeper sympathy stood between me and you, and that I were ready and willing to fulfil my engagement with you, would you still say that God alone held your heart?”
His expression was one of terror and shrinking. “It is not so, Edith!” he exclaimed. “God forbid that it should be so! I could no more go back to those hopes and wishes of the past than I could be a little boy again!”
After the momentary fear and suspense that had accompanied her question, Edith’s first feeling was one of joyful relief and freedom, her second an indignant sense of the wrong that had been done her. She rose from her chair, walked to the other window, and stood there looking out with eyes that saw no object before her. Her mind glanced swiftly back over the last year and a half. She remembered the bright peacefulness of her life, yet half-enshrouded in the mists of childhood, the vision of her womanhood shining large and vague just above the line of her eyelids; for she cared not yet to look at or question that future. She recollected the hopes and aims that had begun to form themselves, of doing good, of making herself such a Catholic as would be a credit to the faith, of helping and instructing her poor, of trying to bring her uncle’s family into the church; and she remembered a faint rose-tinge of personal happiness, soft and rare, and too delicate to be seen, but felt by some finer intuition. Then came the sudden call that had put her life in confusion, the future wrenched rudely open, the many clustering interests trampled by one that demanded to be made paramount. And there was no more cause than this!
Indignation swelled to the point of speech. She turned about, and faced Dick Rowan, and her eyes flashed.
“You may well be ashamed,” she said, “for you have been unmanly! I do not speak of what I have suffered in my own mind; but you have exposed my reputation, which, next to my character, I hold sacred. You have deprived me of your mother’s friendship; for she will never cease to blame me. You have had me proclaimed as your promised wife, every one supposing that the promise was freely given. Yet, when I went down-stairs that day, I was like a victim going to be immolated. Nothing but prayer had strengthened my resolution. I thought that a refusal would be your destruction. You had said as much. You have exposed me to the condemnation of shallow judges, who will be only too glad to find fault. Those people who pronounce without knowing, and think that they can include the motives of another’s whole life in three words, will all condemn me. I, who have tried with constant watchfulness to walk to a hair’s-breadth in the path of womanly propriety, shall be pointed at as the girl who jilted you and broke your heart. And all this, not from the blindness of real affection, which would have excused you in my eyes, but from will, and pride, and a mere fascination. Don’t tell me of eradicating a real affection. It may be conquered, and made subject to duty; but sympathy is not to be eradicated. That feeling which has died in your heart was, indeed, a false blossom.”