at one
says, and feels, hurts so."

She sank down upon a chair. This womanish appeal to his pity had not
been at all in her programme. Nor did it immediately succeed. As he
looked at her, he could only feel the wantonness of this eclipse into
which she had plunged her youth and beauty. There was wrath, a
passionate protesting wrath, under his pain.

"Marcella," he said, sitting down beside her, "did you read my letter
that I wrote you the day before--?"

"Yes."

"And after that, you could still believe that I was indifferent to your
grief--your suffering--or to the suffering of any human being for whom
you cared? You could still think it, and feel it?"

"It was not what you have said all through," she replied, looking
sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, "it is what you have
done."

"What have I done?" he said proudly, bending forward from his seat
beside her. "What have I ever done but claim from you that freedom you
desire so passionately for others--freedom of conscience--freedom of
judgment? You denied me this freedom, though I asked it of you with all
my soul. And you denied me more. Through these five weeks you have
refused me the commonest right of love--the right to show you myself, to
prove to you that through all this misery of differing opinion--misery,
much more, oh, much more to me than to you!--I was in truth bent on the
same ends with you, bearing the same burden, groping towards the same
goal."

"No! no!" she cried, turning upon him, and catching at a word; "what
burden have you ever borne? I know you were sorry--that there was a
struggle in your mind--that you pitied me--pitied _them_. But you judged
it all _from above_--you looked down--and I could not see that you had
any right. It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I
was below--in the midst--_close_ to the horror and anguish of them."

"Whose fault was it," he interrupted, "that I was not with you? Did I
not offer--entreat? I could not sign a statement of fact which seemed
to me an untrue statement, but what prevented me--prevented
us.--However, let me take that point first. Would you,"--he spoke
deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement
which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me?
You owe it to me to answer."

She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye. The man's
mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last
in this