She slipped by him, with a pathetic "Don't! But you know I never could be your wife. You _know_ that." "I don't know it. Why shouldn't you?" "Because I couldn't bring my father's shame on my husband." "It wouldn't touch me, any more than it touches you!" "It would touch your father and mother--and Louise." "They all admire you and honor you. They think you're everything that's true and grand." "Yes, while I keep to myself. And I shall keep to myself. I know how; and I shall not give way. Don't think it!" "You will do what is right. I shall think that." "Don't praise me! I can't bear it." "But I love you, and how can I help praising you? And if you love me--" "I do. I do, with all my heart." She turned and gave him an impassioned look from the height of her inapproachability. "Then I won't ask you to be my wife, Suzette! I know how you feel; I won't be such a liar as to pretend I don't. And I will respect your feeling, as the holiest thing on earth. And if you wish, we will be engaged as no other lovers ever were. You shall promise nothing but to let me help you all I can, for our love's sake, and I will promise never to speak to you of our love again. That shall be our secret--our engagement. Will you promise?" "It will be hard for you," she said, with a pitying look, which perhaps tried him as sorely as anything could. "Not if I can believe I am making it easy for you." They walked along, and she said with averted eyes, that he knew had tears in them, "I promise." "And I promise, too," he said. She impulsively put out her left hand toward him, and he held its slim fingers in his right a moment, and then let it drop. They both honestly thought they had got the better of that which laughs from its innumerable disguises at all stratagems and all devices to escape it. "And now," he said, "I want to talk to you about what brought me over here to-day. I thought at first that I was only going to see your lawyer." XVIII. Matt felt that he need now no longer practise those reserves in speaking to Sue of her father, which he had observed so painfully hitherto. Neither did she shrink from the fact they had to deal with. In the trust established between them, they spoke of it all openly, and if there was any difference in them concerning it, the difference was in his greater forbearance toward the unhappy man. They both spoke of his wrong-doing as if it were his infirmity; they could not do otherwise; and they both insensibly assumed his irresponsibility in a measure; they dwelt in the fiction or the persuasion of a mental obliquity which would account for otherwise unaccountable things. "It is what my sister has always said," Sue eagerly assented to his suggestion of this theory. "I suppose it's what I've always believed, too, somehow, or I couldn't have lived."