" Then, as she would have spoken, he
checked her: "No, don't decide--don't say anything yet. Hear what I have to
tell you first."
She yielded to a curious strained insistence in his voice.
"Very well," she said gently, "you shall tell me just what you will."
He left his place by her side and went over and stood by the chimneypiece,
looking down at her while he spoke, and as she listened it seemed as though
all that he had fought against, believed and disbelieved, suffered and
endured, was made clear to her in the terse, difficult sentences that fell
one by one from his lips.
"You knew that I'd once been deceived by a woman," he said. "Her name
doesn't matter. She deceived me, and my love for her died--as surely as a
man dies if you stab him to the heart. She stabbed my love--and it died,
and I swore then that I would give no other woman the power to hurt me as
she had hurt me. When I met you I knew, almost at once, that you were a
woman whom--if I allowed myself to--I might grow to love. I think it was
your sincerity, your transparent honesty that won me. You were all I'd
dreamed of in a woman--all that I hadn't found in that other woman. But I
was afraid.
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