“Ah!”

There was a something so sharp and sudden about this exclamation that Angela turned round quickly.

“What’s the matter, have you hurt yourself?”

“Yes; but go on, Angela.”

It was an awkward story to tell, especially the George complication part of it, and to any one else she felt that she would have found it almost impossible to tell it, but in Mr. Fraser she was, she knew, sure of a sympathetic listener.  Had she known, too, that the mere mention of her lover’s name was a stab to her listener’s heart, and that every expression of her own deep and enduring love and each tone of endearment were new and ingenious tortures, she might well have been confused.

For so it was.  Although he was fifty years of age, Mr. Fraser had not educated Angela with impunity.  He had paid the penalty that must have resulted to any heart-whole man not absolutely a fossil, who had been brought into close contact with such a woman as Angela.  Her loveliness appealed to his sense of beauty, her goodness to his heart, and her learning to his intellectual sympathies.  What wonder that he learnt by imperceptible degrees to love her; the wonder would have been if he had not.

The reader need not fear, however; he shall not be troubled with any long account of Mr. Fraser’s misfortune, for it never came to light or obtruded itself upon the world or even upon its object.  His was one of those earnest, secret, and self-sacrificing passions of which, if we only knew it, there exist a good many round about us, passions which to all appearance tend to nothing and are entirely without object, unless it to be make the individuals on whom they are inflicted a little less happy, or a little more miserable, as the case may be, than he or she would otherwise have been.  It was to strive to conquer this passion, which in his heart he called dishonourable, that Mr. Fraser had gone abroad, right away from Angela, where he had wrestled with it, and prayed against it, and at last, as he thought, subdued it.  But now, on his first sight of her, it rose again in all its former strength, and rushed through his being like a storm, and he realized that such love is of those things that cannot die.  And perhaps it is a question if he really wished to lose it.  It was a poor thing indeed, a very poor thing, but his own.  There is something so divine about all true love that there lurks a conviction at the bottom of the hearts of most of us that it is better to love, however much we suffer, than not to love at all.  Perhaps, after all, those really to be pitied are the people who are not capable of any such sensation.

But what Mr. Fraser suffered listening that autumn afternoon to Angela’s tale of another’s love and of her own deep return of that love, no man but himself ever knew.  Yet still he heard and was not shaken in his loyal-heartedness, and comforted and consoled her, giving her the best advice in his power, like the noble Christian gentleman that he was; showing her too that there was little need of anxiety and every ground for hope that things would come to a happy and successful issue.  The martyr’s abnegation of self is not yet dead in the world.