The gulf that separated them, dug by her own ineffaceable
crime, was so deep, the distance so wide!
A painful silence fell between them: then Edgar, not looking at her,
said in a constrained voice, "I will keep your dreadful secret, Leam,
sacredly for ever. You feel sure of that, I hope. But, as you say, we
must part. I do not pretend to be better than other men, but I could not
take as my wife one who had been guilty of such an awful crime as this."
"No," said Leam, her parched lips scarcely able to form a word at all.
"Your secret will be safe with me," he repeated.
She did not reply. In giving up himself she had given up all that made
life lovely, and the refuse might as well go as not.
"But we must part."
"Yes," said Leam.
He turned back to the window, desperately troubled. He did really love
her, passionately, sincerely. He longed at this very moment to take her
in his arms and tell her that he would accept her crime if only he might
have herself. Had he not been the master of the Hill and a Harrowby he
would have done so, but the master of the Hill and the head of the house
of Harrowby had a character to maintain and a social ideal to keep pure.
He could not bring into such a home as his, present to his mother as her
daughter, to his sisters as their sister, a girl who by her own
confession was a murderess--a girl who, if the law had its due, would be
hanged by the neck in the precincts of the county jail till she was
dead.
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