“Marianne!” he said at last, with a voice interrupted and choked. “For all these years we have been divided, you and I, I and you, under one roof, and yet with the whole world between us. I never loved any but you—never, never any; and all these long years there has been my old love deep in my heart, not dead, but sleeping; and now and then putting up its hands and uttering a cry, and I have bid it go to sleep again and lie still, and never hoped that the trumpet would sound, and it would spring up to life once more. But why did you not tell me this before? Why did you hide from me that you were the sufferer, you the wronged? If you would have told me this, I would have forgiven you long ago. My heart has been hungering and crying out for love. I have seen you every day, and felt that I have loved you, felt it in every vein. To me you have not grown old, but have remained the same, only there was this shadow of a great darkness between us. I constrained myself, because I considered you had sinned against God and me, and were unworthy of being loved!” Again he drew her head to his shoulder, laid it there, and kissed her, and sobbed, and clasped her passionately. “Marianne! Let him that is without guilt cast the first stone. I forgive you. Tell me that you loved me when I came to you asking you to be mine.” “I did love you, Stephen—you and you only.” “And that other; he who—” he did not finish the sentence—a fresh fit of trembling came on him. “I never did love him, Stephen. Only his title and his position impressed me. I was young, and he was so much my superior in age, in rank, in strength; and the prospect opened before me was so splendid, that a poor, young, trustful, foolish thing like me—” “You did not love him?” Stephen spoke with eagerness. “I have assured you that I never did.” “Oh the age that we have spent together under one roof, united yet separated; one in name, apart in soul; years of sorrow to both of us; years of estrangement; years of disappointed love, and broken trust, and embittered home—all this we owe to him!” Marianne felt his heart beating furiously, and his muscles contracting spasmodically in his face, that was against hers, in his breast, in his arms.