“But you have!” he rejoined. “You have kept this from me.” “Only, believe me, sir,” she cried, eagerly, “until I could find a fitting time.” “And now you want to go to her!” he answered, unheeding. “She has suborned you! She, who has done the greatest wrong to you, has now done the last wrong to me!” He began again to pace up and down the room. “Oh, no! no!” she sobbed. “It is so!” he answered, darting an angry glance at her. “It is so! But I shall not let you go! Do you hear, girl? I shall not let you go! I have suffered enough,” he continued, with a gesture which called those walls to witness to the humiliations, the sorrows, the loneliness, from which he had sought refuge within them. “I will not—suffer again! You shall not go!” She was full of love for him, and of pity. She understood even that gesture, and the past wretchedness to which it bore witness. And she yearned to comfort him, and to convince him that nothing that had gone before, nothing that could happen in the future, would set her against him. Had he been seated, she would have knelt and kissed his hand, or cast herself on his breast and his love, and won him to her. But as he walked she could not approach him, she did not know how to soften him. Yet her duty was clear. It lay beside her dying mother. Nevertheless, if he forbade her to go, if he withstood her, how was she to perform it? At length, “But if she be dying, sir,” she murmured. “Will you not then let me see her?” He looked at her from under his heavy eyebrows. “I tell you, I will not let you go!” he said stubbornly. “She has forfeited her right to you. When she made you die to me—you died to her! That is my decision. You hear me? And now—now,” he continued, returning in a measure to composure, “let there be an end!” She stood silenced, but not conquered; knowing him more intimately than she had known him before; and loving him not less, but more, since pity and sympathy entered into her love and drove out fear; but assured that he was wrong. It could not be her duty to forsake: it must be his duty to forgive. But for the present she saw that in spite of all his efforts he was cruelly agitated, that she had stirred pangs long lulled to rest, that he had borne as much as he could bear. And she would not press him farther for the time. Meanwhile he, as he stood fingering his trembling lips, was trying to bring the cunning of age to bear. He was silently forming his plan. She had been too much alone, he reflected; that was it. He had forgotten that she was young, and that change and movement and life and gaiety were needful for her. This about—that woman—was an obsession, an unwholesome fancy, which a few days in a new place, and amid lively scenes, would weaken and perhaps remove. And by and by, when he thought that he could trust his voice, he spoke.