CHAPTER LXIX
She did not stir, she did not speak. The tears brimmed over and rolled down her cheeks, but she kept her place in silence.
"Will you not come to me?" he pleaded, and she answered then, drearily:
"I cannot."
"You cannot! Oh, Laurel, do not say so!" he cried. "What is to hinder you from coming back to my heart? What can stand between us?"
"Your own words," she answered, brushing the tears away, and gazing at him with eyes full of somber misery and pain.
He was full of wonder and perplexity.
"I cannot understand you," he said. "I would give the world to have you back again, Laurel. I love you with the most faithful love the world ever knew. I shall never cease to love you!"
"Yet once you said—surely you remember it, St. Leon?—that you could never again love a woman who had deceived you. Once fallen from its pedestal, the broken idol could never be restored again."
The words came back to his memory—the words he had spoken before he knew—the words that were all that stood between them now.
He looked at her in anguish. He would have given anything if only he had never made that vain boast—how vain he had never known till now.
"I was foolish and mad and blind," he cried. "It was the most empty boast the world ever knew. Oh, Laurel, will you not forgive me for my hardness and cruelty?"
She stood still, with her small hands folded before her, her fair head drooping low, as she answered:
"I do forgive you."
"Then you will come back to me! You will not be hard upon me, Laurel, I have repented so bitterly. I repented within twenty-four hours after I had put you away from me so hardly. All my life since we parted, has been one long repentance, my darling."
"I did not come back for this, St. Leon," she said, tremulously; "I meant only to give you the child. I thought I should go away then."
Little Laurence uttered a startled cry. He wrenched himself loose from his father's clasp and ran to her to hide his face in the soft white folds of her dress.
"No, no," he said, vehemently, "I cannot stay with Papa unless you will stay, too, Mamma. I love you the best!"
St. Leon looked at his wife. She shrunk a little before that look. It was sadly reproachful.
"You see how it is," he said. "You have kept him from me all his life, and now he has no love to give me!"
But the child interposed, vehemently:
"I love you both, and I will stay with you both. Only Mamma must not go away from Eden."
He drew her forward impulsively as he spoke. He placed her hand in her husband's and closed his own little dimpled fingers around them so that Laurel could not draw hers away.
"Mamma, I love you first and best," he said. "But I love Papa and Grandmamma, too. If he has been naughty, let us forgive him and stay with him."
"Stay with me, Laurel," echoed St. Leon.
She felt the warm, persuasive clasp of his fingers on hers. All the ice about her heart melted beneath that touch. She could not hold out against him. She knew that she must yield if she did not fly from his presence.
"Oh, let me go!" she cried. "It is not best that I should come back to you. It is the child you want. There is so much in the past that would haunt us! There is so much to rouse reproach and regret. We are best apart. Oh, let me go!"
But somehow he had drawn her down to the clasp of his arms now. His warm lips were pressed against her cheek.
"Only one word, dear," he whispered. "Do you love me still, my Laurel?"
"I have loved you always," she murmured, and she knew that with this confession love had conquered pride.
"Then let us forget all else but our love," he pleaded. "You will stay with me, Laurel?"
"I will stay," she answered.
"And never yet since first in Paradise,
O'er the four rivers the first roses blew,
Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind,
Then lived through her who, in that happy hour,
Put hand to hand beneath her husband's heart,
And felt him hers again."
The End
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