'We will cease to speak of them,' Beatrice answered, implying a distinction.

A minute later he saw' that she laid down her pen and rose. He looked up inquiringly.

'I don't feel able to do anything this morning,' she said.

Wilfrid made no reply. She went to the chair on which her hat and mantle lay.

'You are not going?' he asked, in a tone of surprise.

'I think so; I can't be of use to you,' she added, impulsively; 'I have not your confidence.'

He let her throw the mantle over her shoulders.

'Beatrice, surely this is not the result of such a trifle? Look!' He pulled open the drawer once more and threw the pocket-hook on to the table. 'Suppose that had lain there when you came into this room alone.

Should you have opened it and examined the contents?'

'I should not--you know it.'

'Very well. You would simply have taken it for granted that I was to be trusted to look after my own affairs, until I asked someone else's aid or advice. Is not that the case at present?'

A man more apt at dissimulation would have treated the matter from the first with joking irony, and might have carried his point, though with difficulty. Wilfrid had not the apt.i.tude, to begin with, and he was gravely disturbed. His pulses were throbbing; scarcely could he steady his voice. He dreaded a disclosure of what might well be regarded as throwing doubt upon his sincerity, the more so that he understood in this moment how justifiable such a doubt would be. After the merriment of a few minutes ago, this sudden shaking of his nerves was the harder to endure. It revived with painful intensity the first great agitations of his life. His way of speaking could not but confirm Beatrice's suspicions.

'We are not exactly strangers to each other,' she said, coldly.

'No, we are not; yet I think I should have forborne to press you on any matter you thought it needless to speak of.'

She put on her hat. Wilfrid felt his anger rising--our natural emotion when we are disagreeably in the wrong, yet cannot condemn the cause which has made us so. He sat to the table again, as if his part in the discussion were at an end.

Beatrice stood for some moments, then came quickly to his side.

'Wilfrid, have you secrets from me?' she asked, the tremor of her voice betraying the anguish that her suspicions cost her. 'Say I am ill-mannered. It was so, at first; I oughtn't to have said anything. But now it has become something different. However trifling the matter, I can't bear that you should refuse to treat me as yourself. There is nothing, nothing I could keep from you. I have not a secret in my life to hide from you. It is not because they are letters--or not only that.

You put a distance between us you say there are affairs of yours in which I have no concern. I cannot bear that! If I leave you, I shall suffer more than you dream. I thought we were one. Is not your love as complete as mine?'

He rose and moved away, saying--

'Open it! Look at the letters!'

'No, that I can't do. What can it be that troubles you so? Are they letters that I _ought_ not to see?'

He could bear it no longer.

'Yes,' he answered, brusquely, 'I suppose they are.'

'You mean that you have preserved letters which, as often as you open that drawer, remind you of someone else?--that you purposely keep them so near your hand?'

'Beatrice, I had no right to destroy them.'

'No right!' Her eyes flashed, and her tongue trembled with its scorn.

'You mean you had no wish.'

'If I had no right, I could scarcely have the wish.'

Wilfrid was amazed at his own contemptible quibbling, but in truth he was not equal to the occasion. He could not defend himself in choice phrases; in a sort of desperate carelessness he flung out the first retort that offered itself. He was on the point of throwing over everything, of declaring that all must be at an end between them; yet courage failed for that. Nor courage only; the woman before him was very grand in her indignation, her pale face was surpa.s.singly beautiful. The past faded in comparison with her; in his heart he doubted of its power.

Beatrice was gazing at him in resentful wonder.

'Why have you done this?' she asked. 'Why did you come to me and speak those words? What necessity was there to pretend what you did not feel?'

He met her eyes.

'I have not spoken falsely to you,' he said, with calmness which did not strengthen the impression his words were meant to convey.

'When you said that you loved me? If it were true, you could not have borne to have those letters under your eyes. You say you had no right to destroy them. You knew that it was your duty to do so. _Could_ you have kept them?'

Wilfrid had become almost absent-minded. His heart was torn in two ways.

He wished to take the letters from their case and destroy them at once; probably it was masculine pride which now kept him from doing it.

'I think you must believe what I say, Beatrice,' was his answer. 'I am not capable of deliberately lying to you.'

'You are not. But you are capable of deceiving yourself; I accuse you of nothing more. You have deceived yourself, and I have been the cause of it; for I had so little of woman's pride that I let you see my love; it was as if I begged for your love in return. My own heart should have taught me better; there can be no second love. You pitied me!'

Wilfrid was in no state of mind to weigh phrases; at a later time, when he could look back with calmness, and with the advantage of extended knowledge, he recognised in these words the uttermost confession of love of 'which a woman is capable. In hearing them, he simply took them as a reproach.

'If such a thing had been possible,' he said, 'it would have been a horrible injustice to you. I asked you to be my wife because I loved you. The existence of these letters is no proof that I misunderstood my own feeling. There are many things we cannot explain to another on the moment. You must judge the facts as you will, but no hasty and obvious judgment will hit the truth.'

She was not listening to him. Her eyes were fixed upon the letters, and over her heart there crept a desire which all but expelled other feeling, a desire to know what was there written. She would have given her hand to be alone in the room with that pocket-book, now that she knew what it contained; no scruple would have withheld her. The impossibility that her longing could ever be satisfied frenzied her with jealousy.

'I will leave you with them,' she exclaimed, speaking her' thought. 'You do not want me; I come between you and her. Read, and forget me; read them once more, and see then if you do not understand yourself. I know now why you have often been so cold, why it cost you an effort to reply to me. You shall never have that trouble again.'

She moved to quit the room. Wilfrid called her.

'Beatrice! Stay and listen to me. These letters are nothing, and mean nothing; Stay, and see me burn them.'

Irrational as it was, she could not bear to see them destroyed. In her distracted mind there was a sort of crazy hope that he would at last give them to her to burn; she might even perhaps have brought herself to take them away.

'That is childish,' she said. 'You know them by heart; the burning of the paper would alter nothing.'

'Then I can say and do no more.'

It had been like a rending of his heartstrings to offer to destroy these memories of Emily, though he at the same time persuaded himself that, once done, he would be a stronger and a happier man. In truth, they had made the chief strength of the link between him and the past; every day they had reminded him how much of the old feeling lingered in his being; the sanct.i.ty with which these relics were invested testified to the holiness of the worship which had bequeathed them. He had not opened the case since his betrothal to Beatrice, and scarcely a day pa.s.sed that he did not purpose hiding it somewhere away for ever--not destroying.

Beatrice's answer to his offer caused him half to repent that he had made it. He turned away from her.

She, after looking at the pocket-book still for some moments, seemed to force herself away. He heard her open the door, and did not try to stay her.

Half an hour later, Wilfrid restored the letters to their place in the drawer. If they were to be destroyed, it must now be in Beatrice's presence. With something like joy he turned the key upon them, feeling that they were preserved, that the last farewell was once again postponed. Wilfrid was not a very strong man where sacrifice 'was demanded of him.

He neither saw nor heard from Beatrice till the evening of the following day. Then it happened that they had to dine at the same house. On meeting her in the drawing-room, he gave her his hand as usual; hers returned no pressure. She seemed as cheerful as ever in her talk with others; him she kept apart from. He could not make up his mind to write.

She had refused to accept such proof of his sincerity as it wag in his power to offer, and Wilfrid made this an excuse--idle as he knew it to be--for maintaining a dignified silence. Dignified, he allowed himself to name it; yet he knew perfectly well that his att.i.tude had one very ign.o.ble aspect, since he all but consciously counted upon Beatrice's love to bring her back to his feet. He said to himself: Let her interpret my silence as she will; if she regard it as evidence of inability to face her--well, I make no objection. The conviction all the while grew in him that he did veritably love her, for he felt that, but for his knowledge of her utter devotedness, he would now be in fear lest he should lose her. Such fear need not occupy a thought; a word, and she flew to him. He enjoyed this sense of power; to draw out the misunderstanding a little would make reconciliation all the pleasanter.

Then the letters should flame into ashes, and with them vanish even the regret for the blessedness they had promised.