Margaret answered, strangely. She had not
seated herself in the chair he had placed for her; she stood with her
hand resting upon its back.

"What do you mean?"

"All you have said I believe; I believe you would keep to it, carry it
out. But with me it would be different--it would be too much pain; I
would far rather not see you at all. I love you too much," she added. A
burning blush covered her face and throat as she met his eyes. Then it
faded suddenly to so deathly a white that his old fear rushed back upon
him. He had almost forgotten this fear in the lapse of time; but these
terrible waves of color and of pallor, these overwhelming emotions that
made her unable to stand--they brought back to him the old conviction,
"She has no strength, she will not be able to endure it; she will die!"
He took her in his arms and laid her down upon the cushions of a couch,
made sick at heart as he did so by the lightness of her weight. Anything
but that--that she should go from earth forever; anything but that!

As he bent over her, his heart full of his dread, she looked up; she saw
his fear.

"Why--I am not dying," she said, reassuringly, smiling for an instant
with almost a mother's sweetness; "it is nothing,--only the faintness
that very often seizes me; it has been so all my life, it amounts to
nothing. And now will you go? And promise me not to come back?"

"Margaret--that is too much."

"It is the only way; surely I have shown you--told you--in all its
shame, my weakness." And again came the burning blush.

He had knelt down beside her. "Weakness!" He bowed his head upon her
hand.

"Go," she repeated softly.

"I cannot go!"

She tried to rise, but he prevented her. "Margaret!" he said.

"And must I always be the one?" She did rise, she moved from his
grasping hands. "You talk about my dying--_that_ would make me die, to
have you pursue me, ungenerously, brutally, when I have already such
hard pain to bear." With a step that swayed with her exhaustion she went
towards the door. "I can only appeal to you, Evert," she said when she
had reached it, looking back at him over her shoulder--"I can only
appeal to you not to try to see me again. It will be the same with me
always, and so I appeal to you for always. I shall never change; and I
should never yield; so you can see that it will only make me suffer
more."

She turned the latch. "Perhaps, sometime--the years that we give up to
duty here--" She went hastily