He left the question unanswered. He sighed bitterly to himself. “Poor woman!” he said, as a stranger might have said, pitying me. “Poor woman!” My heart swelled in me as if it would burst. I lifted my hand from his bosom, and laid it on his shoulder to support myself. “I don’t ask you to pity me, Eustace; I ask you to do me justice. You are not doing me justice. If you had trusted me with the truth in the days when we first knew that we loved each other--if you had told me all, and more than all that I know now--as God is my witness I would still have married you! _Now_ do you doubt that I believe you are an innocent man!” “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “All your impulses are generous, Valeria. You are speaking generously and feeling generously. Don’t blame me, my poor child, if I look on further than you do: if I see what is to come--too surely to come--in the cruel future.” “The cruel future!” I repeated. “What do you mean?” “You believe in my innocence, Valeria. The jury who tried me doubted it--and have left that doubt on record. What reason have _you_ for believing, in the face of the Verdict, that I am an innocent man?” “I want no reason! I believe in spite of the jury--in spite of the Verdict.” “Will your friends agree with you? When your uncle and aunt know what has happened--and sooner or later they must know it--what will they say? They will say, ‘He began badly; he concealed from our niece that he had been wedded to a first wife; he married our niece under a false name. He may say he is innocent; but we have only his word for it. When he was put on his Trial, the Verdict was Not Proven. Not Proven won’t do for us. If the jury have done him an injustice--if he _is_ innocent--let him prove it.’ That is what the world thinks and says of me. That is what your friends will think and say of me. The time is coming, Valeria, when you--even You--will feel that your friends have reason to appeal to on their side, and that you have no reason on yours.” “That time will never come!” I answered, warmly. “You wrong me, you insult me, in thinking it possible!” He put down my hand from him, and drew back a step, with a bitter smile. “We have only been married a few days, Valeria. Your love for me is new and young. Time, which wears away all things, will wear away the first fervor of that love.” “Never! never!” He drew back from me a little further still.