ou love me! I bless you for it, Pepeeta, but there is something else
that I must know."

"What can it be? Is not everything comprehended in that single word? It
is all-embracing as the air! It enfolds life as the sky enfolds the
world!"

"Ah! Pepeeta, you loved me when we parted, but you did not forgive me!"

She dropped her eyes.

"Have you forgiven me now?"

"It is not true that I did not forgive you," she replied, looking up at
his face again. "There has never been in my heart for a single moment
any sense of a wrong which I could not pardon. It has been one of the
awful mysteries of this experience that I could not feel that wrong!
When I tried to feel it most, my heart would say to me, 'you are not
sorry that he loved you, Pepeeta! You would rather that all this agony
should have befallen you than that he should not have loved you at all!'
It is this feeling that has bewildered me, David. Explain it to me. Let
me know how I could have such feelings in my heart and yet be good. It
seems as if I ought to hate you; but I cannot. I love you, love you,
love you."

"But, Pepeeta, if you loved me, why did you leave me? I do not
comprehend. How could you let me stand in the darkness under your window
and then turn away from it into the awful blackness and solitude to
which I fled?"

"Do not reproach me, I thought it was my duty, David."

"I do not reproach you. I only want to know your inmost heart."

"I do not know! There has been all the time something stronger than
myself impelling me. I grew too weak to reason. I felt that the heart
had reasons of its own, too deep for the mind to fathom, and I yielded
to them. I was only a woman after all, David. Love is stronger than
woman! Oh! it was I who wronged you. I ought not to have forsaken you.
Ought I? I do not know, even now. Who can tell me what is right? Who can
lead me out of this frightful labyrinth? If I did wrong in seeking you,
I humbly ask the pardon of God, and if I did wrong in abandoning you, I
ask forgiveness in all lowliness and meekness from the man I wronged."

"No, Pepeeta, you have never wronged me; I alone have been to blame. The
result could not have been really different, no matter what course you
took. The scourge would have fallen anyway! All that has happened has
been inevitable. Justice had to be vindicated. If it had not come in
one way, it would in another, for there are no short cuts and evasions
in tragedies like this! Every result t