The next instant I started back from him. My heart stood still. I
put my hand up to my face. What did I feel on my cheek? (_I_ had
not been weeping--I was too happy.) What did I feel on my cheek?
A tear!

His face was still averted from me. I turned it toward me, with
my own hands, by main force.

I looked at him--and saw my husband, on our wedding-day, with his
eyes full of tears.


CHAPTER III.

RAMSGATE SANDS.

EUSTACE succeeded in quieting my alarm. But I can hardly say
that he succeeded in satisfying my mind as well.

He had been thinking, he told me, of the contrast between his
past and his present life. Bitter remembrance of the years that
had gone had risen in his memory, and had filled him with
melancholy misgivings of his capacity to make my life with him a
happy one. He had asked himself if he had not met me too late--if
he were not already a man soured and broken by the
disappointments and disenchantments of the past? Doubts such as
these, weighing more and more heavily on his mind, had filled his
eyes with the tears which I had discovered--tears which he now
entreated me, by my love for him, to dismiss from my memory
forever.