'Neither was my coming without thought of you. I had no hope that you would be here, no least hope, but I came because it was here I had seen you.' 'Since Wednesday,' Wilfrid returned, 'I have read your letters many times. Could you still speak to me as you did then?' 'If you could believe me.' 'You said once that you did not love me.' 'It was untrue.' 'May you tell me now what it was that came between us?' She fixed upon him a gaze of sad entreaty, and said, under her breath, 'Not now.' 'Then I will never ask. Let it be what it might; your simple word that you loved me is all I need.' 'I will tell you,' Emily replied, 'but I cannot now. It seemed to me at the time that that secret would have to die with me; I thought so till I met you here. Then I knew that, if you still loved me and had been faithful to me so long, I could say nothing to myself which I might not speak to you. My love for you has conquered every other love and everything that I believed my duty.' 'Is it so, Emily?' he asked, with deepest tenderness. 'When I tell you all, you will perhaps feel that I have proved my own weakness. I will conceal from you nothing I have ever thought; you will see that I tried to do what my purest instincts urged, and that I have been unable to persevere to the end. Wilfrid--' 'My own soul!' 'When I tell you all that happened at that time, I shall indeed speak to you as if your soul and mine were one. It may be wrong to tell you--you may despise me for not keeping such things a secret for ever. I cannot tell whether I am right or wrong to do this. Is your love like mine?' 'I would say it was greater, if you were not so above me in all things.' 'Wilfrid, I was dying in my loneliness. It would not have been hard to die, for, if I was weak in everything else, at least my love for you would have grown to my last breath. If I speak things which I should only prove in silence, it is that you may not afterwards judge me hardly.' 'You shall tell me,' Wilfrid replied, 'when you are my wife. Till then I will hear nothing but that you are and always have been mine.' They came to a great tree about the trunk of which had been built a circular seat. The glades on every side showed no disturbing approach. 'Let us sit here,' said Wilfrid. 'We have always talked with each other in the open air, haven't we?' He drew her to him and kissed her face passionately. It was the satisfying of a hunger of years. With Beatrice his caresses had seldom been other than playful; from the first moment of re-meeting with Emily, he had longed to hold her to his heart. 'Can I hope to keep you now? You won't leave me again, Emily?' 'If I leave you, Wilfrid, it will be to die.' Again he folded her in his arms, and kissed her lips, her cheeks, her eyes. She was as weak as a trembling flower.