It is that you don't trust me in your heart; that is the truth--and that has been the real source of all these morbid ideas you have formed.
"And look you," she went on, with wild anguish in her voice, "we shall never get on together as long as you encourage the faintest suspicion of such thoughts; we shall never have peace beside our hearth--that peace that I have been striving for all these years, when I have been submitting, as I did, to everything--in a way that you know well, Salve, was very far from natural to me," and as she said this she looked with a magnificent air at him; "and if you cannot yet understand that--may God help you--and us!" she ended in despair, and turning half away again to the fire, stared dejectedly into it.
He stood before her half-averted form as if he had been paralysed, and scarcely dared to look up at her, with such truth had all that she had said come home to him.

She had held a mirror up to their life together, and he saw himself in it so utterly selfish and so small by the side of all this love.

He was profoundly pained and humbled, and was too naturally truthful to wish not to acknowledge it.
He went absently to the window and stood there for a moment.
"Elizabeth," he said then, despondently, turning round, "you still must know in your heart that you have been everything in this world to me.
But I know where my great fault to you has been, and I'll tell it you now, fully and freely, even if you must despise me for it.

Yes, Elizabeth, it is true I have never been able to feel absolutely certain that I had full possession of your heart--though, God be praised, you have taught me differently to-day--since that time,"-- it evidently cost him a struggle to go on with the humiliating confession--"since that business between you and the lieutenant.

That has been the thorn in my flesh," he said, gently, as if opening his inmost heart to her, "which I have not been able to get rid of, in spite of my better reason.