It is only I who have to be ashamed!"
"That is all your goodness!" interrupted Godfrey. "Yet, at this
moment, I can not quite be sorry for some things I ought to be
sorry for: but for them I should not be at your side now--happier
than I dare allow myself to feel. I dare hardly think of those
things, lest I should be glad I had done wrong."
"There are things I am compelled to know of myself, Godfrey,
which I shall never speak to you about, for even to think of them
by your side would blast all my joy. How plainly Mary used to
tell me what I was! I scorned her words! It seemed, then, too
late to repent. And now I am repenting! I little thought ever to
give in like this! But of one thing I am sure--that, if I had
known you, not all the terrors of my father would have made me
marry the man."
Was this all the feeling she had for her dead husband? Although
Godfrey could hardly at the moment feel regret she had not loved
him, it yet made him shiver to hear her speak of him thus. In the
perfected grandeur of her external womanhood, she seemed to him
the very ideal of his imagination, and he felt at moments the
proudest man in the great world; but at night he would lie in
torture, brooding over the horrors a woman such as she must have
encountered, to whom those mysteries of our nature, which the
true heart clothes in abundant honor, had been first presented in
the distortions of a devilish caricature.
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