"I know, dearest; that is why I say, settle something, and don't think about it any more."

"How can you be so absurd!" she answered, leaning her head back against the chair, and averting her soft, flushed face as far from me as she could, so successfully that there was little view of anything except the white throat and under-part of her chin as she strained her head back from me.

"Please let things go on as they are."

The words were a positive entreaty, but they fell upon ground where pa.s.sion had blocked access to any of the tenderer, impersonal feelings.

I only felt a rage of impatience as I heard her.

"No, dearest," I said very gently; "that is just what they cannot do;"

and I looked at the swelling neck with the faint blue veins visible in its transparency, and thought, "You must be my own, or I must cease to see you, otherwise I shall strangle you."

"I cannot stand this sort of thing any longer. Not even for you, Lucia, can I run the risk of losing the little brains I possess, which is extremely likely to happen if I let things, as you say, go on as they are."

"Why?" she said, fretfully, turning her head from side to side. "What do I do to you?"

I did not answer this, but I raised myself so that I could look into her face, and our eyes met. She flushed crimson, and did not repeat the question.

"You will kill me if you worry me like this!" she said, evasively, and she did actually look very ill at the moment.

"My sweet, why do you not trust me with the cause of all this hesitation? Are you afraid of me, or do you misunderstand me? Lucia, the woman I have once loved is the woman I must always love. Whatever had happened, whatever she had done, whatever I had heard of her or from her, I should love her still. Has anything occurred since you were with me in Paris that you are afraid to tell me of? Has anyone else come between us? If so, tell me. I shall understand everything. If there is anything to forgive, I will forgive everything. I swear there is nothing that can make any difference to my love for you."

Lucia looked me steadily in the face now. A contemptuous smile curved her lips, all the confusion died out of her eyes, and they filled with a limitless arrogance and self-reliance. I had my answer in her face.

It was the face of a woman whose virtue is absolutely invulnerable, and whose honour is unshadowed, and who has suffered too acutely in the maintenance of both to hear the faintest hint of weakness without a smile. A fierce, delighted satisfaction ran through me before she spoke.

"What do you insinuate, Victor?" she said, lightly, but with pointed directness. "That I have been in love with two men at the same time?

No; nothing of my own will nor my own action stands between us.

Forgive, forsooth!" and she gave a delightful, mocking laugh.

"You are the person to be forgiven, if anybody, for inflicting this year upon me! Now, I ask you to wait a little and you won't!"

"Because I don't see any adequate reason," I returned. "Last year I told you mine, now I demand yours."

I kept my arm round her, and could feel the pulses in her waist throb under it, but I turned my eyes away from her and stared fixedly at the carpet, waiting for her to speak, with the best patience I could command.

"I have told you till I am tired of telling you I must get better first," she said, pettishly.

"But you are not getting better," I persisted.

"On the contrary, all these four months you have been getting steadily worse."

So long a silence followed this that I looked into her face again suddenly, the lips were quivering, and the eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears.

She turned her head away, but not before I had seen them.

"Dearest, would you rather I released you from your promise to me?" I said, bending nearer over her. "Do you wish that?"

One single, violent sob shook the lovely breast beneath me and swelled the throat.

"No," she said, pa.s.sionately; "you know I don't!"

"There is no alternative between that or our marriage," I said, quietly.

I was not trying to be inflexible, nor to harden my heart against her.

It was hardened by pa.s.sion, which at no time is an inspirer of tenderness, and mine had been sufficiently irritated through four months of alternate excitation and resistance to be determined now. My difficulty was not to avoid being too tender, but to check myself from being too harsh. Had I heard my own words in cool blood they might have seemed hard, and my insistence inconsiderate and blamable, but my calm was only artificial, and my judgment little else than a blind clinging to the object with which I had come.

"Why can't you go away for a time and then we can marry later, when you come back?" she answered, in a weak, evasive tone.

"It is not wholly a question of being away from you," I returned. "So long as I am engaged to you, Lucia, my whole life is totally different from that which it would be if I were not."

"I give you permission to lead any life you please," she said vehemently.

"Thank you!" I thought, sarcastically; "but your permission has nothing to do with it."

"It is useless to discuss the matter," I said aloud. "I cannot argue the point with you; I have said there is no third alternative."

"I think you are most unkind," and Lucia let two lovely arms and hands sink over the sides of the chair in gesture of weak despair.

I noticed, indifferently, that she was unnaturally pale.

"If you consent to our marriage, Lucia," I urged, pressing that alluring waist, "I will promise this, if it will simplify matters--you shall continue to live as if you were unmarried until you yourself put things on another footing."

She glanced at me quickly, as I spoke, with an unexpressed surprise.

"Then what would you gain?" she said, coldly, and the unveiled cynicism in the words went home.

I flushed.

"The certainty," I answered, briefly. "This indefinite state of things is simply intolerable."

She was silent for a second; then she said violently, the scarlet flowing over her face up to her eyes--

"No! It would be impossible to maintain such relations as those after marriage, and you know it! That is quite out of the question!"

I merely shrugged my shoulders in silence.

"I am waiting for your answer, Lucia," I said, after a few moments.

"And if I cannot give you one?"

"Then I leave town to-morrow morning."

She gave a fleeting glance into my face, and then suddenly burst into a pa.s.sion of convulsive sobs and tears--sobs that seemed to tear her breast asunder, and tears that started in a blinding torrent, drenching her eyelids and eyelashes and pale cheeks.

"It is most unkind, it is horrible, it is cruel of you to press me in this way!" she sobbed, trying with both hot, trembling hands to push my arm away and to free herself from my clasp.

The sight of her tears hurt me, the pain stamped on the soft face, and the tumultuous rising and falling of her breast in those agonised sobs, reproached me, but the hurt and the reproach were dull. If she thought her tears would induce me to hesitate or to desist, she was wrong. They were to me simply a favourable sign of her weakness, and urged me to press my advantage. I felt instinctively that it would not do to fail now; having gone so far, I must go farther, and be successful. Probably I should be much sooner forgiven by Lucia herself. Nothing is less pardonable, either in love or war, than an unsuccessful attempt.

Her resistance was nothing but nervous folly and weakness, and I believed she herself would be glad to be forced to give it up. Besides, even if my reason had not told me all this, my own feelings would have been enough to make me relentless.

"You may cry," I thought, looking at her as she sobbed with her head strained away from me, "but before I go you shall speak."