in a tone of passionate and sombre
resentment, while his great eyes, lifted, flash a miserable resentment
into mine; "I _knew_ you would be! I have not given you much pleasure
very often, have I?"--(still with that same harsh mirth).--"Well, it is
something to have done it _once_!"

I clasp my down-hanging hands loosely together. I lift my eyes to the
low, dark sky.

"_Am_ I glad?" I say, hazily. "I do not know!--I do not think I am!--I
do not think I care one way or another!"

"Nancy!" he says, presently, in a tone no longer of counterfeit mirth,
but of deep and serious earnestness, "I do not know why I told you just
now that I had come to bid them all good-by--it was not true--you know
it was not. What are they to me, or I to them, now? I came--"

"For what did you come, then?" cry I, interrupting him, pantingly, while
my eyes, wide and aghast, grow to his face. What is it that he is going
to say? He--from whose clasp Barbara's dead hand was freed!

"Do not look at me like that!" he cries, wildly, putting up his hands
before his eyes. "It reminds me--great God! it reminds me--"

He breaks off; then goes on a little more calmly:

"You need not be afraid! Brute and blackguard as I am, I am not quite
brute and blackguard enough for _that_!--that would be past _even_ me! I
have come to ask you once again to forgive me for that--that old
offense" (with a shamed red flush on the pallor of his cheeks); "I asked
you once before, you may remember, and you answered"--(recalling my
words with a resentful accuracy)--"that you _'would not, and, by God's
help, you never would'_!"

"Did I?" say I, with that same hazy feeling. Those old emotions seem
grown so distant and dim. "I dare say!--I did not recollect!"

"And so I have come to ask you once again," he goes on, with a heavy
emphasis--"it will do me no great harm if you say 'No' again!--it will
do me small good if you say 'Yes.' And yet, before I go away
_forever_--yes"--(with a bitter smile)--"cheer up!--_forever!_--I must
have one more try!"

I am silent.

"You may as well forgive me!" he says, taking my cold and passive hand,
and speaking with an intense though composed mournfulness. "After all, I
have not done you much harm, have I?--that is no credit to me, I know. I
would have done, if I could, but I could not! You may as well forgive
me, may not you? God forgives!--at least"--(with a sigh of heavy and
apathetic despair)--"so they say!--would _you_ be less cle