He said very quietly: "No, I will not wait. I will not stay with you. I am going away."
The stress that each suffered was broken out of them by his announcement. The thought of losing him, the thought of how a word, revealing her secret, would keep him, broke from her in her cry: "No, no, Percival! Oh, Percival, no!"
Her sudden voice and its anguish smote him to his depths in his own stress as a sudden cry in the night that shocks the heart. He uttered in a voice she had never heard—most hoarse, most atremble: "Oh, understand! For pity's sake try to understand. I am so that I will never sleep again—never again till I have earned my sleep. Oh, understand that I am a man!"
She saw his dear face, his handsome face, his face that she loved so and was to lose unless she spoke, all twisted up as though he writhed in pain. She cried: "Percival, don't look like that. I can keep you. I cannot let you go."
He looked at her with eyes that told his anguish of this scene and of his spirit. "You cannot keep me," he said. "I am going."
She breathed: "By telling you I can keep you."
He said: "Tell me, then."'
She began, her tongue heavy as a key is rusty that is to turn in a lock closed eighteen years; "Rollo—" she began, and stopped.
He had for a moment believed that she intended to tell him this matter affecting his future that he knew must be delusion—some wonderful plan, as wonderful as impossible, such as a woman leading Aunt Maggie's retired life might have—whose delusion, having it before him, he could at last show her. But at her "Rollo," disappointed, he broke out, "Oh, what has old Rollo to do with it?"
Her voice was making a stumbling effort to hold on at turning the key. But his "Old Rollo" caused her to halt, afraid, as one turning a key in very fact might halt and draw back at a footstep.