“Your career.”
“I have you.”
“You have lost every friend.”
“What do I care about friend’s, Marguerite, when I have you?”
She let go of his arms with such an expression of grief and despair upon her face as cut him to the heart to see. She bowed her forehead upon the palms of her hands and burst into tears. Paul drew her close to him, seeking to comfort her.
“We shall be together, Marguerite, always. Yesterday night, when I foretold you of these massacres—you took it lightly because we were together. You seemed to say nothing in the world mattered so long as we were together.”
“But don’t you see, Paul”—she drew herself away and raised her face, down which tears were running—“we have been both of us alone to-night—already. You here on the roof—I in the court below—and we wanted to be alone, yes, my dear—why deny it, since I know? We wanted to be alone, each of us with our miserable thoughts. . . . In a little while you’ll hate me.”
“No,” he said, violently. “That could never be.”
She bent her head over his hands and pressed them to her eyes, wetting them with her tears.
“Paul,” she whispered between her sobs, “I can’t take such a sacrifice. Oh, my dear, you should have left me with my seven francs and my broken bundle on that balcony in Casablanca.”