“Told me why you never answered my letters?” “Yes, since I could only answer them in one way--by protesting my love and my longing.” There was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers, of a wild confused reconstruction of her shattered past. “You mean, then, that you didn’t write because--” “Because I found, when I reached America, that I was a pauper; that my wife’s money was gone, and that what I could earn--I’ve so little gift that way!--was barely enough to keep Juliet clothed and educated. It was as if an iron door had been suddenly locked and barred between us.” Lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of her incredulity. “You might at least have told me--have explained. Do you think I shouldn’t have understood?” He did not hesitate. “You would have understood. It wasn’t that.” “What was it then?” she quavered. “It’s wonderful you shouldn’t see! Simply that I couldn’t write you _that_. Anything else--not _that!_” “And so you preferred to let me suffer?” There was a shade of reproach in his eyes. “I suffered too,” he said. It was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment it nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent them trembling in the direction of scorn and irony. But even as the impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation. Once again, as so often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always failed to reckon with--the fact of the deep irreducible difference between his image in her mind and his actual self, the mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality. She had phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to herself that she “never could remember him,” so completely did the sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders. Bright and breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside which her private injury paled. “I suffered horribly,” he repeated, “and all the more that I couldn’t make a sign, couldn’t cry out my misery. There was only one escape from it all--to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me.” The blood rushed to Lizzie’s forehead. “Hate you--you prayed that I might hate you?” He rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in his. “Yes; because your letters showed me that, if you didn’t, you’d be unhappier still.” Her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it, and her thoughts, too--her poor fluttering stormy thoughts--felt themselves suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of communion.