embrace.

"Ah!" she said, in her low voice (her voice, like Cordelia's, was ever
low), "all has come back to me,--all that I owe to your protecting,
noble, trustful, guardian love!"

"Hush! hush! the gratitude rests with me; it is so sweet to love, to
trust, to guard! my own, my beautiful--still my beautiful! Suffering has
not dimmed the light of those dear eyes to me! Put your lips to my
ear. Whisper but these words: 'I love you, and for your sake I wish to
live.'"

"For your sake, I pray--with my whole weak human heart--I pray to live!
Listen. Some day hereafter, if I am spared, under the purple blossoms
of yonder waving trees I shall tell you all, as I see it now; all that
darkened or shone on me in my long dream, and before the dream closed
around me, like a night in which cloud and star chase each other! Some
day hereafter, some quiet, sunlit, happy, happy day! But now, all I
would say is this: Before that dreadful morning--" Here she paused,
shuddered, and passionately burst forth, "Allen, Allen! you did
not believe that slanderous letter! God bless you! God bless you!
Great-hearted, high-souled--God bless you, my darling! my husband! And
He will! Pray to Him humbly as I do, and He will bless you." She
stooped and kissed away my tears; then she resumed, feebly, meekly,
sorrowfully,--

"Before that morning I was not worthy of such a heart, such a love as
yours. No, no; hear me. Not that a thought of love for another ever
crossed me! Never, while conscious and reasoning, was I untrue to you,
even in fancy. But I was a child,--wayward as the child who pines for
what earth cannot give, and covets the moon for a toy. Heaven had been
so kind to my lot on earth, and yet with my lot on earth I was secretly
discontented. When I felt that you loved me, and my heart told me that I
loved again, I said to myself, 'Now the void that my soul finds on
earth will be filled.' I longed for your coming, and yet when you went
I murmured, 'But is this the ideal of which I have dreamed?' I asked
for an impossible sympathy. Sympathy with what? Nay, smile on me,
dearest!--sympathy with what? I could not have said. Ah, Allen, then,
then, I was not worthy of you! Infant that I was, I asked you to
understand me: now I know that I am a woman, and my task is to study
you. Do I make myself clear? Do you forgive me? I was not untrue to you;
I was untrue to my own duties in life. I believed, in my vain conceit,
that a mortal's dim vision of