"When I wrote and asked you to marry me, I said I should come
to-night and receive your answer from your own lips. If your
answer had been different, I should never have spoken to you of my
past. It would not have been my duty. I should not have had the
right. I repeat, Isabel, that until you had confessed your love
for me, I should have had no right to speak to you about my past.
But now there is something you ought to be told at once."
She glanced up quickly with a rebuking smile. How could he wander
so far from the happiness of moments too soon to end? What was his
past to her?
He went on more guardedly.
"Ever since I have loved you, I have realized what I should have to
tell you if you ever returned my love. Sometimes duty has seemed
one thing, sometimes another. This is why I have waited so
long--more than two years; the way was not clear. Isabel, it will
never be clear. I believe now it is wrong to tell you; I believe
It is wrong not to tell you. I have thought and thought--it is
wrong either way. But the least wrong to you and to myself--that
is what I have always tried to see, and as I understand my duty,
now that you are willing to unite your life with mine, there is
something you must know."
He added the last words as though he had reached a difficult
position and were announcing his purpose to hold it. But he paused
gloomily again.
She had scarcely heard him through wonderment that he could so
change at such a moment.
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