"If your love had been as strong as mine, had lived as mine had lived, you would not say this to me now."
"It lived till a little while ago, till we came here just now and stood beside the lake—it lived till then—and then—you killed it, Harold, you killed it here."
"Yet true words, it died here after I had kept it warm, after I had cherished it in my heart, after I had regarded it as the best, the sweetest, purest, noblest thing that could ever come into my life, and here you taught me that I was wrong, you degraded it, you made me see that it was not the pure and holy thing I had believed it. You shewed me that it was mean and cruel and selfish. You asked me for—for your reward, yet did not consider what the cost of that reward must be to me. You would have made me an outcast, my name a word of shame, you, who ten years ago never wronged me in word or thought. You would take me from here into the wilderness, thinking that if I could but hide my face from others I might find happiness. Did you give a thought to my soul, to my conscience, where could I have hidden from that?"
He did not answer, he stood looking at her, his brown hands clenched. Smouldering passion was in his breast, the passion of desire, the passion of anger. Yet he could be honest with himself and knew that she was speaking the truth, and had never a word to say in contradiction.
"Just now," she said, "just now you killed my love, you drove it from my heart—it belonged to the man I thought so fine, so splendid, so noble and when I found him ignoble, selfish, self-seeking, it died; it had to die, Harold, and being dead will never live again!" She held out her hand to him, there was a smile on her white face, a rather pitiful smile, for only she and her God knew what she had suffered here in this garden of sunshine.
"We must part here, dear, part—you and I who were lovers, part as lovers for ever, yet we shall meet again in a few hours, I the hostess, you my guest and friend. But I part here from the man I once loved and bidding him good-bye ask that God may bless him always."
"Once!" he said softly. "Once, Kathleen, I once loved? Once?"
"Once!" she said, and bravely looked into his eyes.
Moments of silence passed while he stood looking at her. His face seemed to have grown older, it was haggard, there were lines of pain upon it.