Edmund watched her with utter amazement.  All his knowledge of women was at fault, and that child in the white frock—­where was she?  Where was that sense of his soul’s history and its failure, its mystic tragedy, just now?  Gone, quite gone, for he knew now that that long tragedy was ended.  But Rose did not know it.

He moved, half consciously, a few feet towards the door.

“Rose,” he said, in a very low voice, “if it has come at last, don’t deny it!  I have waited patiently, God knows! but I don’t want it now unless it is true.  For Heaven’s sake do nothing in mere pity!”

“But it has come, Edmund; it has come!” she interrupted him, so quickly that he had barely time to reach her before she came to him.

And yet it had been many years in coming—­so many years that he could hardly believe it now; could hardly believe that the white hands he had watched so often trembled with delight as they caressed him; could hardly believe that the fair face was radiant with joy when he, Edmund, ventured to kiss her; could hardly believe that it was of her own wish and will that she leant against him now!

“I ought not to have said it was the stuffy room, ought I?”

It was the sweetest, youngest laugh she had ever given.  Then she looked up at the ceiling where the sun flickered a little.

“Edmund, it is better than if I had known under the mulberry tree.  Tell me you forgive me all I have done wrong.  I could not,” she gasped a little, “have loved you then as I do now, because I had known no sorrow then.”

And Edmund told her that she was forgiven.  But one sin she confessed gave him, I fear, unmixed delight; she was so dreadfully afraid that she had lately been a little jealous!

Strange—­very strange and unfathomable—­is the heart of man.  It did not even occur to him as the wildest scruple to be at all afraid that he had been lately a little, ever so little, less occupied with the thought of her.  No shadow of a cloud rested on the great output of a strong man’s deep affection.

CHAPTER XXXIX

“WITHOUT CONDITION OR COMPROMISE”

It was on the same evening that Mark succeeded in seeing Molly.  He had failed the day before, but at the second attempt he succeeded.

It was the first time he had entered Westmoreland House, and he had never, even in the autumn weeks when Miss Dexter had been most cordial to him, tried to see her except by her own invitation.  Altogether the position now was as embarrassing as it is possible to conceive.  He had been her confidant as to a crime for which the law sees no kind of palliative, no possible grounds for mercy.  As he greeted her it wanted little imaginative power to feel the dramatic elements in the picture.  Molly was standing in the middle of the great drawing-room dressed in something very white and very beautiful.  At any other moment