"Yes, I love; not as of old, with a girl's blind infatuation, but with
the warmth and wisdom of heart, mind, and soul--love made up of honor,
penitence and trust, nourished in secret by the better self which
lingers in the most tried and tempted of us, and now ready to blossom
and bear fruit, if God so wills. I have been once deceived, but faith
still endures, and I believe that I may yet earn this crowning gift of a
woman's life for the man who shall make my happiness as I make his--who
shall find me the prouder for past coldness, the humbler for past pride
--whose life shall pass serenely loving. And that beloved is--my
husband." If she had lifted her white hand and stabbed him, with that
smile upon her face, it would not have shocked him with a more pale
dismay than did those two words as Pauline shook him off and rose up,
beautiful and stern as an avenging angel. Dumb with an amazement too
fathomless for words, he knelt there motionless and aghast. She did not
speak. And, passing his hand across his eyes as if he felt himself the
prey to some delusion, he rose slowly, asking, half incredulously, half
imploringly, "Pauline, this is a jest?"
"To me it is; to you--a bitter earnest."
A dim foreboding of the truth fell on him then, and with it a strange
sense of fear; for in this apparition of human judgment he seemed to
receive a premonition of the divine.
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