THE STEADFAST HEART
ing about? I don’t understand you. What has happened?”
Angus smiled, not bitterly, but with a sort of dumb resignation. “We can’t start over again—not now. You—went away. You would have stayed away if I had remained nothing but Titus Burke’s son—the son of a thief, the son of a man whose presence you couldn’t bear….” His voice rose a trifle with the effort he put into the control of it. “But I am the same. I tell you I am different in nothing. I am Angus Burke…. Because I have found a family, because I chance to be somebody now whose grandfather and great-grandfather were men to be proud of… that doesn’t alter me…. Nor because I will some day be rich…. That’s the point, Lydia. You aren’t coming back to me, because you love me, because you need me—but because my grandfather is Henry G. Woodhouse and my mother was his daughter…. I cannot take you back. It wouldn’t be fair… to myself.” He opened and shut his hands. “If only you had come—before….”
Lydia rested against the door for support, fumbled at the knob…. This was terrible, unbelievable, unthinkable…. She did not understand what had happened in spite of his words, and she would have gone on her knees to him had she thought it would have availed, but she
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