, Peter, I should be another woman
to-day, a whole woman, a wise woman. Oh, I have thought of it much. The
secret of life was there at my side from the time I was able to pronounce
your name, and I couldn't see it. You had it. You stayed. You took duty
where you found it, and it has made you great. Oh, I don't mean to speak
in a worldly sense. When I say that, it is to express the highest human
quality of which I can think and feel. But I can't marry you. You must
see it."

"I cannot see it," he replied, when he had somewhat gained control of
himself.

"Because I should be wronging you."

"How?" he asked.

"In the first place, I should be ruining your career."

"If I had a career," he said, smiling gently, "you couldn't ruin it. You
both overestimate and underestimate the world's opinion, Honora. As my
wife, it will not treat you cruelly. And as for my career, as you call
it, it has merely consisted in doing as best I could the work that has
come to me. I have tried to serve well those who have employed me, and if
my services be of value to them, and to those who may need me in the
future, they are not going to reject me. If I have any worth in the
world, you will but add to it. Without you I am incomplete."

She looked up at him wonderingly.

"Yes, you are great," she said. "You pity me, you think of my
loneliness."

"It is true I cannot bear to picture you here," he exclaimed. "The
thought tortures me, but it is because I love you, because I wish to take
and shield you. I am not a man to marry a woman without love. It seems to
me that you should know me well enough to believe that, Honora. There
never has been any other woman in my life, and there never can be. I have
given you proof of it, God knows."

"I am not what I was," she said, "I am not what I was. I have been
dragged down."

He bent and lifted her hand from her knee, and raised it to his lips, a
homage from him that gave her an exquisite pain.

"If you had been dragged down," he answered simply, "my love would have
been killed. I know something of the horrors you have been through, as
though I had suffered them myself. They might have dragged down another
woman, Honora. But they have strangely ennobled you."

She drew her hand away.

"No," she said, "I do not deserve happiness. It cannot be my destiny."

"Destiny," he repeated. "Destiny is a thing not understandable by finite
minds. It is not necessarily continued tragedy and waste, of that