"Do not speak. I have to tell you. I had forgotten
it," she went on to say in the same tense, compressed manner--the manner
of one who has a task to get through, and has gathered all her strength
for the effort, leaving none to be squandered in emotion--"I was so
happy in these last days I had forgotten it. Now I have remembered, and
we must part."
Edgar was grieved to see her in such deadly trouble, for it was easy to
see her pain beneath her still exterior, but he was confident, and if
grieved not afraid. Leam's little life, so innocent and uneventful as it
must have been, could hold no such tremendous evil, could have been
smirched with no such damning stain, as that at which she seemed to
hint. Grant even that there had been something more between her and
Alick Corfield than he would quite like to hear--which was his first
thought--still, that more must needs be very little, could but be very
simple. His wife must be spotless--that he knew, and he would marry none
whose past was not as unsullied as new-fallen snow, as unsullied as must
be her future--absolute purity--the unruffled emotions of a maidenhood
undisturbed until now even by dreams, even by visions. He owed it to
himself and his position that his wife, man of many loves as he was,
should be this; but at the worst the childish affection of brother and
sister, which was all that could possibly have been between Leam and
that awkward young gangrel Alick Corfield, could have nothing in it that
he ought to take to heart or that should influence him.
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