"None--unless you can have faith. There can be no happiness for us
without that."
He took a sudden step towards her.
"Oh, my dear, my dear! I love you so!"
Diana began to cry softly--helpless, pathetic, weeping, like a child's.
"And--and I thought we were so happy," she sobbed. "Now it's all
spoiled and broken. And you've spoilt it!"
"Don't!" he said unsteadily. "Don't cry like that. I can't stand it."
He made an instinctive movement to take her in his arms, but she
slipped aside, turning on him in sudden, passionate reproach.
"Why did you try and make me love you when you knew . . . all this? I
was quite happy before you came--oh, so happy!"--with a sudden yearning
recollection of the days of unawakened girlhood. "If--if you had let
me alone, I should have been happy still."
The unthinking selfishness of youth rang in her voice, asserting its
infinite demand for the joy and pleasure of life.
"And I?" he said, very low. "Does my unhappiness count for nothing?
I'm paying too. God knows, I wish we had never met."
Never to have met! Not to have known all that those months of
friendship and a single hour of love had held! The words brought a
sudden awakening to Diana--a new, wonderful knowledge that, cost what
they might in bitterness and future pain, she would rather bear the
cost than know her life emptied of those memories.
She had ceased crying.
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