gh
ignorance, youth, inexperience, and also--forgive me for mentioning
it, but it is my best justification--also because I loved you, with a
love which I was then too ignorant even to comprehend. I needs must
beg you to remember that, in owning my great wrong to you. This
wrong," he continued, after an instant's pause, "consisted in my
urging you to marry me when you did not love me. I feared it was so,
even then; but I was selfish; I thought of myself and not of you.
When the whispered misgiving would rise up in my mind I forced it
down by vowing that if you did not already love me I could and would
make you do so. When the blow fell, and I knew that I had lost you, I
knew that my selfishness in thinking chiefly of my own happiness had
been properly rewarded. At least this was the feeling that possessed
my heart after the first. You were young, confiding, inexperienced. I
knew better than you possibly could know that you did not love me.
Later, you knew it also."

He waited, as if for her response. From behind her close-pressed
hands the answer came.

"Yes," she said, lowly, "I have long known that it was a mistake on
my part. You are right. I did not love you."

Had she been looking, she would have seen a shadow cross his face--a
very faint one, as the hope that it obscured had been faint also.

"Therefore," he said, "I took advantage of you, and obtained from you
a promise which I should never have asked. I want you to feel that I
realize the wrong I did you in that, and ask your forgiveness for
it."

Slowly she lowered her hands and looked at him.

"And you can ask forgiveness of me?" she said.

"I humbly beg it--as on my knees."

"Then what should be my attitude to you?"

"The proud and upright one of never having done me any conscious
wrong."

"But when I left you, rejected you, threw you off--"

"That was not done to me, but to the man you supposed me to be--the
man who had been proved to you a scoundrel, by such proof as any one
would have deemed you mad to doubt."

She looked at him somewhat timidly.

"You are generous indeed," she said.

"I am no whit more than just. You were absolutely warranted in such
a course toward me. What I long to do--what I have crossed the world
in the hope of doing--is to get you to forgive yourself, to free
yourself of a hallucination which is casting a needless shadow on
your life."

"Oh, you are good--good!" she said. "I never knew so kind a heart.
Therefore