FOR CISSY'S SAKE.
"The burden of my heart, dear,
There's little need to tell;
There's little need to say, dear,
I've loved you long and well.
"And you will be my wife, dear,
So may you ever bless
Through all your sunny life, dear,
The day you answered yes."
Cissy paused for breath, and her lover looked at her adoringly.
Never had she looked so beautiful, never had she seemed so truly noble
as at this moment when so generously pleading the cause of the woman
who had brought such bitter sorrow into her life.
He forgot for a moment the tall, fair, beautiful woman who hung
breathlessly on his fiat of fate, and exclaimed, rapturously:
"Cissy, you are an angel!"
"Yes, she is an angel!" cried the governess, eagerly. "She is an angel,
and she will forgive you all your faults and make you happy yet--so
happy that you might afford to spare the poor wretch whose sins have
all recoiled upon her own head with crushing weight!"
"Spare her!" pleaded Cissy, with humid eyes.
He looked back at her tenderly, and answered:
"For your sake!"
With a sob of joy, the governess fled from the room.
And with her going the last shadow that her wicked influence had cast
upon their lives faded into the past.
He moved closer to Cissy, catching both her trembling hands in his, and
looking deep into her tearful eyes, saying, tremulously:
"My darling, the events of to-day have thrown down the last barriers
of restraint between us, and we are back again where we left off that
bitter day when you cast me off for the sake of the woman who declared
she had a better claim to me. Cannot we go back to that past?"
Her face was downcast, her eyes drooped from his, she trembled, and did
not speak.
But he was not repulsed, for she let him keep the little trembling
hands in his, and he was thus encouraged to go on in a low voice,
hoarse from passionate love:
"Cissy, I love you more devotedly than ever, and I should have sought
you long ago but that I feared a repulse. I knew so well your willful
pride, you see. But now fate has thrown us together again, and it will
break my heart to lose this new sweet hope. Darling, will you forgive
the past, and let the future make amends?"
Cissy had not thought last night that she would be won so quickly as
this. She had resolved in her heart to be quite cold at first, and make
her lover's second wooing very difficult.
But as Cameron said, the events of the day had made reserve impossible.
They had come face to face with the past in all its love and pain.
So she could not steel her responsive heart to her lover's impetuous
wooing. With a great burst of tears that revealed all her heart, she
threw herself into his eager arms that clasped and held her with
boundless delight.
And the woman whom Cissy had saved from exposure by her generous prayer
for mercy, crept away to her room, muttering, in a fearful way:
"How strangely fate pursues me in this house! I thought I was done with
my bitter past, but three of its ghosts have risen here to confront me
with my sins! What a terrible blunder I made going into that room! But
I did not dream of meeting my divorced husband there! Still, I might
have guessed he would follow that girl, the one love of his life. She
is indeed an angel, but alas! she would not intercede for me if she
knew the thing I had done last night!"