"The best reasoning. So long as it was only you, you could do as you pleased. But now that you know that--that others will suffer too--" She paused. "I am sure I have not trusted you in vain?" she said, appealingly.

But he shook his head, the triumph still animated him. "You can trust me in one way; I won't take advantage, that is, not now. But you needn't try to make me think, Margaret, that it's not something to be glad about--to know that you care for me." He laughed a little from his sheer satisfaction; then, in his old way, he put his hands compactly down in the pockets of his coat, and stood there looking at her.

"Is it anything to be glad about--my wretchedness?" she asked, strengthening herself for the contest.

"It makes you wretched? Strange!"

"I am so wretched--I have been wretched so long--that only my firm belief that my Creator knows best has enabled me to live on, has kept me from ending it."

"Why should you be more unhappy than I am? Nothing could make _me_ end my life now."

She looked at him in silence.

"If you look at me in that way--" Winthrop began.

She left her place. He stood where he was, watching her, but he was not paying much heed to what she was saying, now. He had the great fact, man-like, he was enjoying it; it was enough for the present--after all these years.

She seemed to see how little impression she had made. She came back to the old stone a second time to complete her story. "I tried so hard--I was so glad when I saw how you disliked me," she began.

"It wasn't dislike."

"I thought it was; and I was miserably glad. What did I take charge of Garda for but because I thought you loved her? That should be my penance, she should be like my own sister, and I would do everything that I possibly could for her, for her sake and yours. She was so very beautiful--"

He interposed here. "Yes, she was beautiful; but beautiful for everybody. Your beauty is dearer, because it is kept, in its fullest sweetness, for the man you love."

But no blush rose in her face, she was too unhappy for that; she was absorbed, too, in trying to reach him, to touch him, so that he would see what must be, as she saw it. "I did all I could for her," she went on, earnestly--"you know I did; I tried to influence her, I tried to love her; and I did love her. I was sure, too, that she cared for you--"

"It isn't everybody, you must remember, that has your opinion of me,"

interrupted her listener, delightedly.

"But she herself had told me--Garda had told me that she---- However, I begin to think that I have never comprehended Garda."

"Don't try."

"I love her all the same. That afternoon when she was on her way to Madam Giron's to see Lucian, and I took her place, it seemed to me that day that an opportunity had been given to me to complete my penance to the full, and crush out my own miserable folly. I could save her in your eyes, and I could lose myself; for, after that, you could have, of course, only contempt for me. I believed that you loved her, I didn't see how you could help it (I don't see very well even now). And I believed, too, that under all her fancies, her real affection was yours; or would come back to you."

"All wrong, Margaret, the whole of it. Overstrained, exaggerated."

"It may be so, I was very unhappy, I had brooded over everything so long. Next, Lanse came back. And that was a G.o.dsend."

"G.o.dsend!" said Winthrop, his face darkening.

"Yes. It took me away from you."

"To him."

"You have never understood--I was only the house-keeper--he wished to be made comfortable, that was all. It was a great deal better for me there."

"Was it, indeed; you looked so well and happy all that time!" His joyousness was gone now; anger had come again into his eyes.

"I could not be happy, how could I be? But at least I was safe. Then he left me that second time. And you were there; that was the hardest of all."

"You bore it well! I remember I found it impossible to get a word with you. The truth is, Margaret, I have never known you to falter, you are not faltering in the least even now. I can't quite believe, therefore, that you care for me as you say you do; you certainly don't care as I care for you, perhaps you can't. But the little you do give me is precious; for even that, small as it is, will keep you from going back to Lanse Harold."

"Keep me from going back? What do you suppose I have told you this for?

Don't you see that it is exactly this--my feeling for _you_--that sends me, drives me back to him? On what plea, now, could I refuse to go? The pretense of unhappiness, of having been wronged?" She paused. Then rushed on again. "The law--of separation, I mean--is founded upon the idea that a wife is outraged, insulted, by her husband's desertion; but in my case Lanse's entire indifference to me, his estrangement--these have been the most precious possessions I have had! If at any time since almost the first moment I met you he _had_ come back and asked for reconciliation, promised to be after that the most faithful of husbands, what would have become of me? what should I have said? But he did not ask--he does not now; I can only be profoundly grateful."

"Yes, compare yourself with a man of that sort--do; it's so just!"

"It is perfectly just. I am a woman, surrounded by all a woman's cowardice and nervousness and fear of being talked about; and he is a man, and not afraid; but at heart--at _heart_--how much better am I than he? You do not know--" She stopped. "I consider it a great part of my offense against my husband that I have never loved him," she added.

"The old story! Go on now and tell me that if you had loved him, he himself would have been better."

"No, that I cannot tell you; even if I had cared for him, I might have had no influence." She spoke with humility.

"Lanse knew perfectly that I did not love him, he knew it when I didn't," she went on. "And I really think--yes, I must say it--that if I had cared for him even slightly, he would have been more guarded, would have concealed more, spared me more; in little things, Lanse is kind.

But he knew that I shouldn't suffer, in that way at least. And it was quite true; my real suffering--the worst suffering--has not come from him at all; it has come from you. At first I had plans--I was too young to give up all hope of something brighter some time. But my plans soon came to an end; when I knew--discovered--that I was beginning to care for you, all my hope turned to keeping in the one straight track that lay before me. I did not think I should fail--"

"I can well believe that!" he interrupted.

"Oh, do not be harsh to me! you do not know--You think my will is strong. But oh! it isn't--it isn't. When Lanse left me that second time, and you were there with me, I knew then that there was nothing for it but to go as far away from you as possible, and to go instantly; anything less, no matter how I should disguise it, would be staying because I wished to stay. And I did try to go; I would not enter that hotel when I saw you on the sh.o.r.e--I went back to the empty house. I dared not stay then. I _will_ not now."

"You do well to change the terms," he answered, with unsparing bitterness, "it's nothing but will to-day, whatever it may once have been. I don't believe about your not daring; I don't, in fact, believe--that is, fully--anything you have said."

"Why, then, should I stay here talking longer?" She left the place and entered the orange grove, which she was obliged to pa.s.s through on her way to the house.

But he overtook her, he stepped in front and barred the way. "You have been remarkably skilful. I demanded an explanation, I was evidently going to make trouble. So you gave me this one: you said that you had, unfortunately for yourself, begun to love me, that was the explanation of everything; you threw me this to stop me, like a bone to a dog, so that you could get comfortably away. But I have this to tell you: if you had really loved me, you couldn't have argued quite so well! And you couldn't go now, either, so self-complacently, leaving me here in my pain."

"So be it," she said. She looked through the blossoming aisles to the right, to the left, as if in search of some rescuer, some one.

"But what does a woman like you know of love, after all--real love?" he went on, with angry scorn. "As a general thing, the better she is, the less she knows. And I have never denied that you were good, Margaret."

She moved to pa.s.s him.

"Not yet. You have reasoned the whole case out too well, there was rather too much reason; a lawyer couldn't have done it better."

"I have had time to think of the reasons. How often each day do you suppose I have gone over everything--over and over? And how many days have there been in these long years?"

"It isn't the time. It's your nature."

"Very well. It's my nature."

"But you needn't suppose that your having that nature will stop me," he said, with a certain violence of tone roused by her agreement with these accusations. "You have confessed to some sort of liking for me, I shall take advantage of it as far as it goes (not far, I fear); I shall make it serve as the foundation of all I shall constantly attempt to do."

Her arms dropped by her sides. "Constantly? I believe there is nothing in the world so cruel as a man when he pretends to care for you." She moved off a step or two. "I do not love you, you say? I adore you. From almost the first day I saw you--yes, even from then. It is the one love of my life, and remember I am not a girl, it's a woman who tells you this--to her misery. And it is everything about you that I love--that makes it harder; not only what you say and how you say it, what you think and do, but what you _are_--oh! what you are in everything. The way you look at me, the tone of your voice, the turn of your head, your eyes, your hands--I love them, I love them all. I suffer every moment, it has been so for years. I am so miserable away from you, so desperate and lonely! And yet when I am with you, that is harder. Whichever way I turn, there is nothing but pain, it is so torturing that I wonder how I can have lived! Yet would I give it up? Never."

The splendor of her eyes, as she poured forth these words, her rapt expression, the slight figure, erect and tense--he could no more have dared to touch her then than he could have touched a shining seraph that had lighted for an instant in his path.