Part One Paradise Lost Chapter 12 The Scotch Verdict

"Why do you leave me?" I said. "Why do you speak to me in this cruel way? Are you angry, Eustace? My darling, if you are angry, I ask you to forgive me."

"It is I who ought to ask your pardon," he replied. "I beg you to forgive me, Valeria, for having made you my wife."

He pronounced those words with a hopeless, heart-broken humility dreadful to see. I laid my hand on his bosom. I said, "Eustace, look at me."

He slowly lifted his eyes to my face--eyes cold and clear and tearless--looking at me in steady resignation, in immovable despair. In the utter wretchedness of that moment, I was like him; I was as quiet and as cold as my husband. He chilled, he froze me.

"Is it possible," I said, "that you doubt my belief in your innocence?"

He left the question unanswered. He sighed bitterly to himself. "Poor woman!" he said, as a stranger might have said, pitying me. "Poor woman!"

My heart swelled in me as if it would burst. I lifted my hand from his bosom, and laid it on his shoulder to support myself.

"I don't ask you to pity me, Eustace; I ask you to do me justice. You are not doing me justice. If you had trusted me with the truth in the days when we first knew that we loved each other--if you had told me all, and more than all that I know now--as God is my witness I would still have married you! Now do you doubt that I believe you are an innocent man!"