"Evelina," began the man, without preliminary, "I have come back. I have come to tell you that I am a coward--a shirk."
Miss Evelina laughed quietly in a way that stung him. "Yes?" she said, politely. "I knew that. You need not have troubled to come and tell me."
He winced. "Don't," he muttered. "If you knew how I have suffered!"
"I have suffered myself," she returned, coldly, wondering at her own composure. She marvelled that she could speak at all.
"Twenty-five years ago," he continued in a parrot-like tone, "I asked you to marry me, and you consented. I have never been released from my promise--I did not even ask to be. I slunk away like a cur. The honour of the spoken word still holds me. The tardy fulfilment of my promise is the only atonement I can make."
The candle-light shone on his iron-grey hair, thinning at the temples; touched into bold relief every line of his face.
"Twenty-five years ago," said Evelina, in a voice curiously low and distinct, "you asked me to marry you, and I consented. You have never been released from your promise--you did not even ask to be." The silence was vibrant; literally tense with emotion. Out of it leaped, with passionate pride: "I release you now!"
"No!" he cried. "I have come to fulfil my promise--to atone, if atonement can be made!"
"Do you call your belated charity atonement? Twenty-five years ago, I saved you from death--or worse. One of us had to be burned, and it was I, instead of you. I chose it, not deliberately, but instinctively, because I loved you. When you came to the hospital, after three days----"
"I was ill," he interrupted. "The gas----"
"You were told," she went on, her voice dominating his, "that I had been so badly burned that I would be disfigured for life. That was enough for you. You never asked to see me, never tried in any way to help me, never sent by a messenger a word of thanks for your cowardly life, never even waited to be sure it was not a mistake. You simply went away."
"There was no mistake," he muttered, helplessly. "I made sure."
He turned his eyes away from her miserably. Through his mind came detached fragments of speech. The honour of the spoken word still holds him . . . Father always does the square thing . . .
"I am asking you," said Anthony Dexter, "to be my wife. I am offering you the fulfilment of the promise I made so long ago. I am asking you to marry me, to live with me, to be a mother to my son."