“Oh, don’t, don’t!” she cried, shrinking from him. “You know I cannot argue with you. But I am sure that I was right, that I am right now. Please let me go.”
“In a moment, in a moment,” he answered, grasping her two hands. “I probably will never see you again, Kate—so let me now speak out. I asked you to take three months to think it over, and promised you that I would then give you the reasons for my strange conduct and beg of you to face the world with me for our great love’s sake.”
“Yes,” she said, freeing her hands; “you said you would be able to convince me that there was no dishonor in your love, no wrong in what you would propose that we should do. Three months you gave me—three months. Why, Mr. Fair, three minutes would be enough for me to reach the only possible decision which you, an English gentleman, can ask a young and unprotected English girl like me to make. But I was grateful for your three months’ silence. If you could trust yourself, I am compelled to own that I could not so trust myself. I love you—may God forgive me, but I cannot help it! But your chivalrous respite of three months has given me a grip upon myself. I do not fear myself. I do not fear even you. I am to leave your house, never to see you again. And some day you will thank me.”
There had been a wondrous new development of strength and beauty in her as she spoke, and Fair had watched her with profoundest feeling.
“Kate, Kate, you wrong me, upon my honor!” he cried when she ceased. “The promise that I made you was one that I could keep. There is a mystery, an awful something in my life, that has through all these years kept me so falsely true, that, being true to one great object fixed on me by my fate, I’ve been compelled to seem what I am not to all the world. To get you, Kate, to rest at last my broken heart upon your love, I was this very night to break the self-imposed conditions of my weird life-purpose. God! how I counted them, these long, slow days, waiting for this one! An hour ago I still supposed that I could fold you on my heart tonight and tell you everything! I thought that I could say the word that would dispel your doubts and make you—you only in the world see me as God does. But now I cannot. Be brave and hear me, Kate,” he added, holding her arm, which was trembling under the influence of his own great passion. “I am a criminal. I have done that which must make you despise me, must drive me from the society of men, and bring me to the gibbet.”