"Good-bye," she said, holding out her hand.
"Don't be too sorry for me. You have lightened my heart inexpressibly by what you have told me. Now that I can feel that you know all--that, wrong and wicked as I was, I was not so false as it seemed--I can bear the future with courage. I am sure of it. I want to say good-bye now, because I prefer not to see you again. You would only try to shake me in a determination that is not to be shaken. Don't trouble about me--please don't," she added. "I have health and youth, and these will suffice me for what I have to do."
"Health and youth!" he cried, ignoring her proffered hand, and throwing his own hands up in a gesture of repudiation. "And what do these signify in a situation such as yours? They only mean that you will prolong an existence which, for such a woman as you, seems worse than death. You ask me to leave you so? To say good-bye--"
"Yes, I beg it, I implore it, I insist upon it," she interrupted him, feeling that her strength was almost gone. "You have said that you were willing to do me a service--then leave me."
"My God! am I a brute?" he said. "Have I made you ill with my idiotic persistency? I will go. I will rid you of the distress and annoyance of my presence. But before I go, Bettina," he said, with a sudden break in his voice, "I must and will satisfy my heart by one thing: I must, for the sake of my own soul's peace, tell you this. I have never ceased to love you, and I never shall. I gave you up when I saw the renunciation to be inevitable, but I knew then, as I know now, that I can never put any other in your place. You were the love of my youth, and you will be the love of my old age, if my lonely life goes on till then. Don't turn from me. Don't hide your face like that. I ask nothing but this sacred right to speak. I know you never loved me. I know it is not in me--if, indeed, it be in any mortal man--to enter into the heaven of being loved by you. But, at least, you have been the vision in my life--the sacred manifestation of what girl and sweetheart and woman and wife might be--and for that I thank you. In the shadow of that beatific vision I shall walk henceforth, and believe me when I say that I shall walk there alone."