the identity of the child who I had every reason to believe was at
that very moment fluttering a few steps below in the care of the colored
maid, whose voice I could faintly hear; she, with his passion to meet
and quell, had this secret to maintain; hearing his wild entreaties with
one ear and listening for the possible outbursts of the
not-to-be-restrained child with the other; mad to go--to catch her train
before discovery overwhelmed her, yet not daring to hasten him, for his
mood was a man's mood and not to be denied. I felt sorry for her, and
cast about in my mind what aid to give the situation, when the passion
of his words seized me, and I forgot her position in the interest I
began to feel in his.

"Valerie, Valerie," he was saying, "this is cruelty. You go with no good
cause that I can see--put the sea between us, and yet say no word to
make the parting endurable. You understand what I suffer--my hateful
thoughts, my dread, which is not so much dread as--Oh, that I should say
it! Oh, that I should feel it!--hope; guilty, unpardonable hope. Yet you
refuse me the little word, the kindly look, which would alleviate the
oppression of my feelings and give me the thought of you to counteract
this eternal brooding upon Gwendolen and her possible fate. I want a
promise--conditional, O God! but yet a promise; and you simply bid me to
have patience; to wait--as if a man could wait who sees his love, his
life, his future trembling in the balance against the fate of a little
child. If you loved me--"

"Hush!" The feeling in that word was not for him. I felt it at once; it
was for her secret, threatened every instant she lingered there by some
move, by some word which might escape a thoughtless child. "You do not
understand me, Justin. You talk with no comprehension of myself or of
the event. Six months from now, if all goes well, you will see that I
have been kind, not cruel. I can not say any more; I should not have
said so much. Go back, dear friend, and let me take the train with
Harry. The sea is not impassable. We shall meet again, and then--" Did
she pause to look behind her down those steps--to make some gesture of
caution to the uneasy child?--"you will forgive me for what seems
cruelty to you now. I can not do differently. With all the world weeping
over the doubtful fate of this little child, you can not expect me
to--to make any promise conditional upon her _death_."

The man's cry drove the irony of the situ