"You loved me?" she said in a voice grown soft-
husky still, but soft as the light in a summer heaven. "You loved me
--and have always loved me since we first met?"
Her look was so appealing, so passionate and so womanly, that he longed
to reach out his arms to her, and say, "Come--come home, Sheila," but the
situation did not permit that, and only his eyes told the story of what
was in his mind.
"I have always loved you, Sheila, and shall do so while I have breath and
life. I have always given you the best that is in me, tried to do what
was good for us both, since my misfortune--crime, Lord Mallow calls it,
as does the world. Never a sunrise that does not find you in the
forefront of all the lighted world; never a flower have I seen that does
not seem sweeter--it brings thoughts of you; never a crime that does not
deepen its shame because you are in the world. In prison, when I used to
mop my floor and clean down the walls; when I swept the dust from the
corners; when I folded up my convict clothes; when I ate the prison food
and sang the prison hymns; when I placed myself beside the bench in the
workshop to make things that would bring cash to my fellow-prisoners in
their need; when I saw a minister of religion or heard the Litany; when I
counted up the days, first that I had spent in jail and then the days I
had still to spend in jail; when I read the books from the prison library
of the land where you had gone, and of the struggle there; when I saw
you, in my mind's eye, in the cotton-fields or on the verandah of your
house in Virginia--I had but one thought, and that was the look in your
face at Playmore and Limerick, the sound of your voice as you came
singing up the hill just before I first met you, the joyous beauty of
your body.
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