Her face grew pale and flushed at once, so that the spot on either cheek shone like carmine on a milk-white ground. She looked helplessly at him with her lips slightly parted and her eyes beaming, as if through a haze.
"Oh, I have pained you!" he exclaimed, with such a penitent and sorrowful intonation that she made a weak effort to smile. "Forgive me," he went on rapidly. "I seem in an unfortunate groove to-day. You know I would not wound you for the world."
"It relieves me that you have said what you have," she replied, after a pause, "for it tells me that you know my past. I wanted you to know, and I could not tell you. I did not see how I ever could begin or how----"
"Let it pass, let it go by like the wind," he murmured; "the future is all ours, we will make it as pure and lovely as the sky yonder, won't we, love?"
She crossed her hands in her lap and smiled on him with tears in her eyes. How grand and beautiful he appeared to her, reclining there, with his stalwart limbs outstretched and his manly face beaming with love. It was a quick, uncontrollable impulse that caused her to say, with a tender tremor in her voice:
"I wanted you to know that I loved him and that if he were alive now I would still love him, notwithstanding all that has happened."
"Yes, yes, that is all right, all right," he quickly responded. "It is sweet of you to feel so; but he is--he is not alive, you know, and--"
"Sometimes I have dreamed that it is not true--that he is not dead, but may be living yet. I never could get the particulars, the country was in such turmoil and he was so far away. Somehow the thought has haunted me that some day he will come back."
A strange grim look settled on Reynolds' face.
"No," she replied, "I know he will not. It is foolish for me to allow the thought to enter my mind, but it will, and I can not drive it out."
"You must, Agnes, you must," he exclaimed with a rush of passion, "for my sake, love, for my sake."
She sat for a moment in silence, and then, as the tears welled up afresh in her tender eyes, she replied:
"You know how gladly I would, but I can not. It grows upon me since--since I have known you, and it will not be banished. Sometimes I find myself actually going to the door to look--"