Peter, I should be another woman to-day, a whole woman, a wise woman.  Oh, I have thought of it much.  The secret of life was there at my side from the time I was able to pronounce your name, and I couldn’t see it.  You had it.  You stayed.  You took duty where you found it, and it has made you great.  Oh, I don’t mean to speak in a worldly sense.  When I say that, it is to express the highest human quality of which I can think and feel.  But I can’t marry you.  You must see it.”

“I cannot see it,” he replied, when he had somewhat gained control of himself.

“Because I should be wronging you.”

“How?” he asked.

“In the first place, I should be ruining your career.”

“If I had a career,” he said, smiling gently, “you couldn’t ruin it.  You both overestimate and underestimate the world’s opinion, Honora.  As my wife, it will not treat you cruelly.  And as for my career, as you call it, it has merely consisted in doing as best I could the work that has come to me.  I have tried to serve well those who have employed me, and if my services be of value to them, and to those who may need me in the future, they are not going to reject me.  If I have any worth in the world, you will but add to it.  Without you I am incomplete.”

She looked up at him wonderingly.

“Yes, you are great,” she said.  “You pity me, you think of my loneliness.”

“It is true I cannot bear to picture you here,” he exclaimed.  “The thought tortures me, but it is because I love you, because I wish to take and shield you.  I am not a man to marry a woman without love.  It seems to me that you should know me well enough to believe that, Honora.  There never has been any other woman in my life, and there never can be.  I have given you proof of it, God knows.”

“I am not what I was,” she said, “I am not what I was.  I have been dragged down.”

He bent and lifted her hand from her knee, and raised it to his lips, a homage from him that gave her an exquisite pain.

“If you had been dragged down,” he answered simply, “my love would have been killed.  I know something of the horrors you have been through, as though I had suffered them myself.  They might have dragged down another woman, Honora.  But they have strangely ennobled you.”

She drew her hand away.

“No,” she said, “I do not deserve happiness.  It cannot be my destiny.”

“Destiny,” he repeated.  “Destiny is a thing not understandable by finite minds.  It is not necessarily continued tragedy and waste, of that I am certain.  Only a little thought is required, it seems to me, to assure us that we cannot be the judges of our own punishment on this earth.  And of another world we know nothing.  It cannot be any one’s destiny to throw away a life while still something may be made of it.  You would be throwing your life away here.  That no other woman is possible, or ever can be possible, for me should be a consideration with you, Honora.  What I ask of you is a sacrifice—­will you make me happy?”