She looked at him steadily, as a child might have done, with no shrinking in her glance, with neither anger nor shame.  “And you?” she asked, wistfully.  “Were you very kind to me?”

“I was not.  God!” he said, “if you could only know how I have suffered for the way I acted!  To feel such shame as I have felt!  Oh,” he cried, “nobody on earth could make me talk this way but you!  There was always between us a curious understanding, wasn’t there, Katrine, even apart from the other?” He finished vaguely.

“I knew you would suffer.  I was sorry for that,” she answered, gravely.

“Were you, truly?  Were you big enough for that?”

“Well,” and the sad smile with which the Irish so often speak of personal grief came to her lips, “you see, I loved you.  And when one loves one wishes for happiness for the one beloved, does one not?  Yes,” she said, “I was honestly sorry to think that you would have even a regret.  I would have taken all the sorrow if I could.”

“You loved me then?” His head was gone.  He remembered only the sweetness of her presence and the nearness of her.  “You did love me then, Katrine?”

She rose suddenly as though to leave him.

“Don’t go,” he said, reaching his hand toward her with pleading in his tone.

She reseated herself, her face exquisitely pale.  “Ah,” she said, “you know I loved you!  I was so young, and it was all so terrible to me!  Please God, you may never suffer as I did!  I have lain awake night after night praying to die, or waking with dread at the knowledge that as soon as consciousness came the horrible pain would return with it, and there came the resentment to the great God for my birth, as though that could make any real difference.  But it was good for me.  The very best thing in all the world.  Nothing else could ever have taught me as it did.”

“Katrine!” he cried, and, the doctor’s orders forgotten, he sat up and leaned toward her “believe me, I have waited all these years to see you, to talk with you!  But unless two people are entirely honest, I knew the thing would be impossible.  I thought you would forgive me, would understand as you grew older!”

“I understood then,” she interrupted.  “My whole life had trained me to understand.  I was not in the least critical of you.  I am not now.  You followed your birth and your training.  You had been taught no self-control.  Women had spoiled you.  You had never had to consider others.  I want to be perfectly frank with you about it all.  I never deceived you in word, tone, or look.  I shall not begin now.  You were my ideal man in everything.  You know,” she paused, an amused smile upon her lips and her lids lowered, “you know I thought Henry of Agincourt, Wolfe Tone, and Robert Bruce must have been like you, and I was grateful to the good God for letting me live in your time and country.”

She ceased speaking, and her eyes rested upon the far-away sea with the remembering tenderness a woman might give to an old plaything of childhood before she continued: