of Philip.'
When I remember that the first feeling she roused in me was nothing worthier of a professing Christian than astonishment, I drop in my own estimation to the level of a savage. 'Do you really mean,' I was base enough to ask, 'that you have forgiven him?'
She said, gently: 'How could I help forgiving him?'
The man who could have been blessed with such love as this, and who could have cast it away from him, can have been nothing but an idiot. On that ground—though I dared not confess it to Eunice—I forgave him, too.
'Do I surprise you?' she asked simply. 'Perhaps love will bear any humiliation. Or perhaps I am only a poor weak creature. You don't know what a comfort it was to me to keep the few letters that I received from Philip. When I heard that he had gone away, I gave his letters the kiss that bade him good-by. That was the time, I think, when my poor bruised heart got used to the pain; I began to feel that there was one consolation still left for me—I might end in forgiving him. Why do I tell you all this? I think you must have bewitched me. Is this really the first time I have seen you?'
She put her little trembling hand into mine; I lifted it to my lips, and kissed it. Sorely was I tempted to own that I had pitied and loved her in her infancy. It was almost on my lips to say: 'I remember you an easily-pleased little creature, amusing yourself with the broken toys which were once the playthings of my own children.' I believe I should have said it, if I could have trusted myself to speak composedly to her. This was not to be done. Old as I was, versed as I was in the hard knowledge of how to keep the mask on in the hour of need, this was not to be done.
Still trying to understand that I was little better than a stranger to her, and still bent on finding the secret of the sympathy that united us, Eunice put a strange question to me.
'When you were young yourself,' she said, 'did you know what it was to love, and to be loved—and then to lose it all?'
It is not given to many men to marry the woman who has been the object of their first love. My early life had been darkened by a sad story; never confided to any living creature; banished resolutely from my own thoughts. For forty years past, that part of my buried self had lain quiet in its grave—and the chance touch of an innocent hand had raised the dead, and set us face to face again! Did I know what it was to love, and to be loved, and then to lose it all? 'Too well, my child; too well!'
That was all I could say to her. In the last days of my life, I shrank from speaking of it. When I had first felt that calamity, and had felt it most keenly, I might have given an answer worthier of me, and worthier of her.
She dropped my hand, and sat by me in silence, thinking. Had I—without meaning it, God knows!—had I disappointed her?
'Did you expect me to tell my own sad story,' I said, 'as frankly and as trustfully as you have told yours?'
'Oh, don't think that! I know what an effort it was to you to answer me at all. Yes, indeed! I wonder whether I may ask something. The sorrow you have just told me of is not the only one—is it? You have had other troubles?'
'Many of them.'
'There are times,' she went on, 'when one can't help thinking of one's own miserable self. I try to be cheerful, but those times come now and then.'
She stopped, and looked at me with a pale fear confessing itself in her face.
'You know who Selina is?' she resumed. 'My friend! The only friend I had, till you came here.'
I guessed that she was speaking of the quaint, kindly little woman, whose ugly surname had been hitherto the only name known to me.
'Selina has, I daresay, told you that I have been ill,' she continued, 'and that I am staying in the country for the benefit of my health.'
It was plain that she had something to say to me, far more important than this, and that she was dwelling on trifles to gain time and courage. Hoping to help her, I dwelt on trifles, too; asking commonplace questions about the part of the country in which she was staying. She answered absently—then, little by little, impatiently. The one poor proof of kindness that I could offer, now, was to say no more.
'Do you know what a strange creature I am?' she broke out. 'Shall I make you angry with me? or shall I make you laugh at me? What I have shrunk from confessing to Selina—what I dare not confess to my father—I must, and will, confess to You.'
There was a look of horror in her face that alarmed me. I drew her to me so that she could rest her head on my shoulder. My own agitation threatened to get the better of me. For the first time since I had seen this sweet girl, I found myself thinking of the blood that ran in her veins, and of the nature of the mother who had borne her.
'Did you notice how I behaved upstairs?' she said. 'I mean when we left my father, and came out on the landing.'
It was easily recollected; I begged her to go on.
'Before I went downstairs,' she proceeded, 'you saw me look and listen. Did you think I was afraid of meeting some person? and did you guess who it was I wanted to avoid?'
'I guessed that—and I understood you.'
'No! You are not wicked enough to understand me. Will you do me a favor? I want you to look at me.'
It was said seriously. She lifted her head for a moment, so that I could examine her face.
'Do you see anything,' she asked, 'which makes you fear that I am not in my right mind?'
'Good God! how can you ask such a horrible question?'
She laid her head back on my shoulder with a sad little sigh of resignation. 'I ought to have known better,' she said; 'there is no such easy way out of it as that. Tell me—is there one kind of wickedness more deceitful than another? Can it be hid in a person for years together, and show itself when a time of suffering—no; I mean when a sense of injury comes? Did you ever see that, when you were master in the prison?'
