"Yes--perhaps for a little while. You gave me a year of infinite happiness--our honeymoon year. That ought to be enough. I have no right to ask for more--but let there be no talk of gratitude--if I cannot have love I will have nothing." "You have been so cold, so silent and reserved, so changed. I thought you were tired of me." "Tired of you? Poor child! How should you know the measureless love in the heart of a man of my life-history? When I took you in my arms in the evening sunshine, I gave you all that was best and strongest in my nature--boundless love and boundless trust. All my life-history went for nothing in that hour. I did not ask myself if I was the kind of man to win the heart of a girl. I did not think of my five-and-forty years or my forbidding face. I gave myself up to that delicious dream. I had found the girl who could love me, the divine girl, youth and innocence incarnate. Think what it was after a year of happiness to be awakened by a look, and to know that I had again been fooled, and that if in the first surprise of my passionate love you had almost loved me, that love was dead." "No, no," she sobbed; and then she hid her streaming eyes upon his breast, and wound her arms about his neck, clinging to the husband in whom she found her only shelter. Was it some curious instinct of the flesh, or some power of telepathy, that told him not to take these tears and wild embrace for tokens of a wife's love? "My dearest girl," he said with infinite gentleness, as he loosened the clinging arms and lifted the hidden face, "if this distress means sorrow for having unwittingly deceived me, for having taken a man's heart and not been able to give him love for love, there need be no more tears. The fault was mine, the mistake was mine. You must not suffer for it. To me you will always be unspeakably sweet and dear--whether I think of you as a wife, or as the girl my daughter loved--and whom I learned to love in those sad days when the shadow of death went with us in the spring sunshine. Yes, Vera, you will always be dear--my dearest on this earth. But there must be no pretending, nothing false. Think of me as your friend and protector, the one friend whom you can always trust, your rock of defence against all the dangers and delusions of a wicked world. Trust me, dearest, and never keep a secret from me. Be true to yourself, keep your honour stainless, your purity of mind unclouded by evil associations. Let no breath of calumny soil your name. Rise superior to the ruck of your friends, and have no dealings with the lost women whose guilt Society chooses to ignore. I ask no more than this, my beloved girl, in return for measureless love and implicit faith." He was holding both her hands, looking at her with searching eyes; those clear grey eyes under a brow of power. "Can you promise as much as this, Vera? "Yes." "With heart and mind?" "With heart and mind."