Dont,dont treat me so cruelly!O Harry,Harry,have pity,and withdraw those dreadful words!I am truthful by nature--I am--and I dont know how I came to make you misunderstand!But I was frightened!She quivered so in her perturbation that she shook him with her {Note:sentence incomplete in text.}
Did you say you were sitting on that tomb?he asked moodily.
Yes;and it was true.
Then how,in the name of Heaven,can a man sit upon his own tomb?
That was another man.Forgive me,Harry,wont you?
What,a lover in the tomb and a lover on it?
Oh--Oh--yes!
Then there were two before me?
I--suppose so.
Now,dont be a silly woman with your supposing--I hate all that,said Knight contemptuously almost.Well,we learn strange things.I dont know what I might have done--no man can say into what shape circumstances may warp him--but I hardly think I should have had the conscience to accept the favours of a new lover whilst sitting over the poor remains of the old one;upon my soul,I dont.Knight,in moody meditation,continued looking towards the tomb,which stood staring them in the face like an avenging ghost.
But you wrong me--Oh,so grievously!"she cried.I did not meditate any such thing:believe me,Harry,I did not.It only happened so--quite of itself.
Well,I suppose you didnt INTEND such a thing,he said.
Nobody ever does,he sadly continued.
And him in the grave I never once loved.
I suppose the second lover and you,as you sat there,vowed to be faithful to each other for ever?
Elfride only replied by quick heavy breaths,showing she was on the brink of a sob.
You dont choose to be anything but reserved,then?he said imperatively.
Of course we did,she responded.
"Of course!"You seem to treat the subject very lightly?
It is past,and is nothing to us now.
Elfride,it is a nothing which,though it may make a careless man laugh,cannot but make a genuine one grieve.It is a very gnawing pain.Tell me straight through--all of it.
Never.O Harry!how can you expect it when so little of it makes you so harsh with me?
Now,Elfride,listen to this.You know that what you have told only jars the subtler fancies in one,after all.The feeling I have about it would be called,and is,mere sentimentality;and I dont want you to suppose that an ordinary previous engagement of a straightforward kind would make any practical difference in my love,or my wish to make you my wife.But you seem to have more to tell,and thats where the wrong is.Is there more?
Not much more,she wearily answered.
Knight preserved a grave silence for a minute."Not much more,"he said at last.I should think not,indeed!His voice assumed a low and steady pitch.Elfride,you must not mind my saying a strange-sounding thing,for say it I shall.It is this:that if there WERE much more to add to an account which already includes all the particulars that a broken marriage engagement could possibly include with propriety,it must be some exceptional thing which might make it impossible for me or any one else to love you and marry you.
Knights disturbed mood led him much further than he would have gone in a quieter moment.And,even as it was,had she been assertive to any degree he would not have been so peremptory;and had she been a stronger character--more practical and less imaginative--she would have made more use of her position in his heart to influence him.But the confiding tenderness which had won him is ever accompanied by a sort of self-committal to the stream of events,leading every such woman to trust more to the kindness of fate for good results than to any argument of her own.
