He waited, as if for her response. From behind her close-pressed hands the answer came.
"Yes," she said, lowly, "I have long known that it was a mistake on my part. You are right. I did not love you."
Had she been looking, she would have seen a shadow cross his face--a very faint one, as the hope that it obscured had been faint also.
"Therefore," he said, "I took advantage of you, and obtained from you a promise which I should never have asked. I want you to feel that I realize the wrong I did you in that, and ask your forgiveness for it."
Slowly she lowered her hands and looked at him.
"And you can ask forgiveness of me?" she said.
"Then what should be my attitude to you?"
"The proud and upright one of never having done me any conscious wrong."
"But when I left you, rejected you, threw you off--"
"That was not done to me, but to the man you supposed me to be--the man who had been proved to you a scoundrel, by such proof as any one would have deemed you mad to doubt."
"I am no whit more than just. You were absolutely warranted in such a course toward me. What I long to do--what I have crossed the world in the hope of doing--is to get you to forgive yourself, to free yourself of a hallucination which is casting a needless shadow on your life."
"Oh, you are good--good!" she said. "I never knew so kind a heart. Therefore must my unending misery be the greater that I have once wounded it."
"That consciousness should have no sting for you hereafter. You did it in utter ignorance. I cannot claim that I was half so ignorant in my wrong toward you. But surely we may remember that we have once been friends, and so we may feel that there is full and free forgiveness between us before we part."
She did not speak. That last word had pierced too deeply to her heart.
"You do forgive me--do you not?" he said, as if he misunderstood her silence.
"I thank you--I bless you--I seek _your_ forgiveness," she said.
At these last words he smiled--a smile that had a certain bitterness in it. Then suddenly his face became rigidly grave.
"If I had not given you my forgiveness, long ago," he said, "I should like to offer it to you now, at a price. I wish to God that I could."
"What do you mean?" she said, a sweet perplexity upon her face. "What price have I to pay for anything?"