FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180   181   182   183   184  
185   186   187   188   189   190   191   192   193   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   201   202   203   204   205   206   207   208   209   >>   >|  
toic at all to be supplicating here; but I do supplicate to you. I wish you knew what is in me of devotion to you; but it is impossible, that. In bare human mercy to a lonely man, don't throw me off now!" "I don't throw you off--indeed, how can I? I never had you." In her noon-clear sense that she had never loved him she forgot for a moment her thoughtless angle on that day in February. "But there was a time when you turned to me, before I thought of you! I don't reproach you, for even now I feel that the ignorant and cold darkness that I should have lived in if you had not attracted me by that letter--valentine you call it--would have been worse than my knowledge of you, though it has brought this misery. But, I say, there was a time when I knew nothing of you, and cared nothing for you, and yet you drew me on. And if you say you gave me no encouragement, I cannot but contradict you." "What you call encouragement was the childish game of an idle minute. I have bitterly repented of it--ay, bitterly, and in tears. Can you still go on reminding me?" "I don't accuse you of it--I deplore it. I took for earnest what you insist was jest, and now this that I pray to be jest you say is awful, wretched earnest. Our moods meet at wrong places. I wish your feeling was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours! Oh, could I but have foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going to lead me into, how I should have cursed you; but only having been able to see it since, I cannot do that, for I love you too well! But it is weak, idle drivelling to go on like this.... Bathsheba, you are the first woman of any shade or nature that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the having been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial so hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! But I don't speak now to move your heart, and make you grieve because of my pain; it is no use, that. I must bear it; my pain would get no less by paining you." "But I do pity you--deeply--O, so deeply!" she earnestly said. "Do no such thing--do no such thing. Your dear love, Bathsheba, is such a vast thing beside your pity, that the loss of your pity as well as your love is no great addition to my sorrow, nor does the gain of your pity make it sensibly less. O sweet--how dearly you spoke to me behind the spear-bed at the washing-pool, and in the barn at the shearing, and that dearest last time in the evening at your ho
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180   181   182   183   184  
185   186   187   188   189   190   191   192   193   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   201   202   203   204   205   206   207   208   209   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

deeply

 

encouragement

 
Bathsheba
 
feeling
 

earnest

 
bitterly
 

nature

 
looked
 

washing

 

evening


cursed
 

dearest

 

claiming

 

drivelling

 

shearing

 

addition

 

sorrow

 

paining

 

earnestly

 

denial


promised
 

grieve

 
sensibly
 

dearly

 

thought

 
reproach
 

turned

 

February

 

thoughtless

 

ignorant


letter

 

valentine

 

attracted

 

darkness

 

moment

 
forgot
 

devotion

 

impossible

 

supplicate

 

supplicating


lonely

 

knowledge

 

wretched

 

insist

 

reminding

 
accuse
 
deplore
 

foreseen

 
torture
 

places