The man would answer with a kind
of anxious politeness, getting up to look over the child's shoulder.
Passing Deleah, he would stoop for the book he had purposely dropped by
her chair. "I love you!" she would hear his fierce low whisper in her ear.
She had been too depreciative of herself, too innocent of the workings of
passion, to have felt anything but irritation and annoyance at the signs
in him of a suffering she could not believe in or understand. Was it
possible, after all, that she, Deleah, whose heart was so tender, whose
ways so pitiful, who saved the drowning flies and would not willingly have
afflicted the meanest of God's creatures, by means of a pale and pretty
face only, had wrought that havoc?
With a sob in her throat she came forward into the room. Upon the table
were lying the two purple clematis flowers, backed by a spray of their own
foliage and tied with the tendrils of the plant. Deleah recalled the
repulsion with which she had seen them lying there. She put out her hand
towards them, but drew it back. She could not touch them even now.
To each of us, however mean our lives and obscure our history, living or
dead, the moment of triumph comes. To Charles Gibbon his came, when
Deleah, forgetful of her new-found bliss, and the Heaven of Happiness
opening before her, laid her head upon the table beside the poor blooms of
the clematis flower, and as if her heart were broken, cried for the fate
of the Honourable Charles.
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