They were wild, passionate, incoherent;
unlike any that had ever passed his lips, or been poured out in her
presence. He felt mad with the struggle that tore him asunder, the
longing to tell the truth to her, though he should never after look upon
her face again, and the honor which bound silence on him for sake of the
man whom he had sworn under no temptation to dispossess and to betray.
She heard him silently, with her grand, meditative eyes, in which the
slow tears still floated, fixed upon him. Most women would have thought
that conscious guilt spoke in the violence of his self-accusation; she
did not. Her intuition was too fine, her sympathies too true. She felt
that he feared, not that she should unjustly think him guilty, but that
she should justly think him guiltless. She knew that this, whatever its
root might be, was the fear of the stainless, not of the criminal life.
"I hear you," she answered him gently; "but I do not believe you, even
against yourself. The man whom Philip loved and honored never sank to
the base fraud of a thief."
Her glorious eyes were still on him as she spoke, seeming to read his
very soul. Under that glance all the manhood, all the race, all the
pride, and the love, and the courage within him refused to bear in her
sight the shame of an alien crime, and rose in revolt to fling off the
bondage that forced him to stand as a criminal before the noble gaze of
this woman. His eyes met hers full, and rested on them without wavering;
his head was raised, and his carriage had a fearless dignity.
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