"It seems impossible that I could care for you more deeply than I do."

"If you could only respond with a little tenderness--"

"I _do_ respond--as well as I know how," she said piteously.

He drew her nearer and touched her cheek with his lips:

"I know, dear. I don't mean to complain."

"Oh, Clive! I have let you fall in love with me and it is making you miserable! And now it's making me miserable, too, because you are disappointed in me."

"No--"

"You are! I'm not what you expected--not what you wanted--"

"You are everything I want!--if I could only wake your heart!" he said in a low tense voice.

"It isn't my heart that is asleep.... I know what you miss in me....

And I can't help it. I--I don't wish to help it--or to be different."

She dropped her head against his shoulder. After a few moments she spoke from there in a m.u.f.fled, childish voice:

"What can I do about it? I don't want to be your mistress, Clive.... I never wanted to do--anything--like that."

A deeper colour burnt his face. He said: "Could you love me enough to marry me if I managed to free myself?"

"I have never thought of marrying you, Clive. It isn't that I couldn't love you--that way. I suppose I could. Probably I could. Only--I don't know anything about it--"

"Let me try to free myself, anyway."

"How is it possible?"

He said, exasperated: "Do you suppose I can endure this sort of existence forever?"

The swift tears sprang to her eyes. "I don't know--I don't know," she faltered. "I thought this existence of ours ideal. I thought you were going to be happy; I supposed that our being together again would bring happiness to us both. It doesn't! It is making us wretched. You are not contented with our friendship!" She turned on him pa.s.sionately: "I don't wish to be your mistress. I don't want you to make me wish to be. No girl naturally desires less than she is ent.i.tled to, or more than the law permits--unless some man teaches her to wish for it. Don't make such a girl of me, Clive! You--you are beginning to do it. And I don't wish it! Truly I don't!"

In that fierce flash of candour,--of guiltless pa.s.sion, she had revealed herself. Never, until that moment, had he supposed himself so absolutely dominant, invested with such power for good or evil. That he could sway her one way or the other through her pure loyalty, devotion, and sympathy he had not understood.

To do him justice he desired no such responsibility. He had meant to be honest and generous and unselfish even when the outlook seemed most hopeless,--when he was convinced that he had no chance of freedom.

But a man with the girl he loves in his arms might as well set a net to catch the wind as to set boundaries to his desires. Perhaps he could not so ardently have desired his freedom to marry her had he not as ardently desired her love.

Love he had of her, but it was an affection utterly innocent of pa.s.sion. He knew it; she realised it; realised too that the capacity for pa.s.sion was in her. And had asked him not awaken her to it, instinctively recoiling from it. Generous, unsullied, proudly ignorant, she desired to remain so. Yet knew her peril; and candidly revealed it to him in the most honest appeal ever made to him.

For if the girl herself suspected and dreaded whither her loyalty and deep devotion to him might lead her, he had realised very suddenly what his leadership meant in such a companionship.

Now it sobered him, awed him,--and chilled him a trifle.

Himself, his own love for her, his own pa.s.sion he could control and in a measure subdue. But, once awakened, could he control such an ally as she might be to his own lesser, impatient and hot-headed self?

Where her disposition was to deny, he could still fetter self and acquiesce. But he began to understand that half his strength lay in her unwillingness; half of their safety in her inexperience, her undisturbed tranquillity, her aloofness from physical emotion and her ignorance of the mastery of the lesser pa.s.sions.

The girl had builded wholesomely and wisely for herself. Instinct had led her truly and well as far as that tangled moment in her life.

Instinct still would lead her safely if she were let alone,--instinct and the intelligence she herself had developed. For the ethical view of the question remained only as a vague memory of precepts mechanical and meaningless to a healthy child. She had lost her mother too early to have understood the casual morals so gently inculcated. And n.o.body else had told her anything.

Also intelligence is often a foe to instinct. She might, with little persuasion accept an unconventional view of life; with a little emotional awakening she might more easily still be persuaded to a logic builded on false foundations. Add to these her ardent devotion to this man, and her deep and tender concern lest he be unhappy, and Athalie's chances for remaining her own mistress were slim enough.

Something of this Clive seemed to understand; and the understanding left him very serious and silent where he stood in the soft glow of the lamp with this young girl in his arms and her warm, sweet head on his breast.

He said after a long silence: "You are right, Athalie. It is better, safer, not to respond to me. I'm just in love with you and I want to marry you--that's all. I shall not be unhappy about it. I am not, now.

If I marry you, you'll fall in love, too, in your own way. That will be as it should be. I could desire no more than that. I _do_ desire nothing more."

He looked down at her, smiled, releasing her gently. But she clung to him for a moment.

"You are so wonderful, Clive--so dear! I _do_ love you. I will marry you if I can. I want to make up everything to you--the lonely years, your deep unhappiness--even," she added shyly, "your little disappointment in me--"

"You don't understand, Athalie. I am not disappointed--"

"I _do_ understand. And I am thinking of what will happen if you fail to free yourself.... Because I realize now that I don't propose to leave you to grow old all alone.... I shall live with you when you're old whatever people may think. I tell you, Clive, I'm the same child, the same girl that you once knew, only grown into a woman. I know right from wrong. I had rather not do wrong. But if I've got to--I won't whimper. And I'll do it thoroughly!"

"You won't do it at all," he said, smiling at her threat to the little tin G.o.ds.

"I don't know. If they won't give you your freedom, and if--"

"Nonsense, Athalie," he said, laughing, coolly master of himself once more. "We mustn't be unwholesomely romantic, you and I. I'll marry you if I can; if I can't, G.o.d help us, that's all."

But she had become very grave: "G.o.d help us," she repeated slowly.

"Because I believe that, rightly or wrongly, I shall one day belong to you."

He said: "It can be only in one way. The right way." Perhaps he had awakened too late to a realisation of his power over her, for the girl made no response, no longer even looked at him.

"Only one way," he repeated, uneasily;--"the right way, Athalie."

But into her dark blue eyes had come a vague and brooding beauty which he had never before seen. In it was tenderness, and a new wisdom, alas! and a faint and shadowy something, profound, starlike, inscrutable.

"As for love," he said, forcing a lighter tone, "there are fifty-seven different varieties, Athalie; and only one is poisonous,--unless taken with the other fifty-six, and in small doses."

She smiled faintly and walked to the window. Rain beat there in the darkness spattering the little iron balcony. Below, the bleared lights of the city stretched away to the sky-line.

He followed, and slipped his arm through hers; and she bent her wrist, interlacing her slim fingers with his.

"You know," he said, "that when I often speak with apparent authority I am wrong. In the final a.n.a.lysis _you_ are the real leader, Athalie.

Your instincts are the right ones; your convictions honest, your conclusions just. Mine are too often confused with selfishness and indecision. For mine is an irresolute character;--or it was. I'm trying to make it firmer."

She pressed his hand lightly, her eyes still fixed on the light-smeared darkness.

He went on more gravely: "Candour and the intuition born of common sense,--that is where you are so admirable, dear. Add to that the tenderest heart that ever beat, and a proud ignorance of the lesser, baser emotions--and, who am I to interfere,--to come into the sweet order of your life with demands that confuse you--with complaints against the very destiny I brought upon us both--with the clamour of a selfish and ign.o.ble philosophy which your every instinct rejects, and which your heart entertains only because it _is_ your heart, and its heavenly sympathy has never failed me yet.... Oh, Athalie, Athalie, it would be a shameful day for me and a bitter day for you if my selfishness and irresolution ever swerved you. What I have lost--if I have indeed lost it--is lost irrevocably. And I've got to learn to face it."