He did not respond, but remained stolidly gazing over the cliffs upon the sea.
‘Will you not speak?’ she said, after a pause.
He turned upon her and took her hand.
‘Plautia, I would you had never come to this spot. It had been better if you had never left home. Return at once. Let me see you safely away, this night if possible.’
Her face grew as ghastly white as the limestone rock bathed in the moonlight, and a deadly sickness seized upon her heart and numbed her faculties for a moment.
‘You wish to be quit of me—you spurn me!’ she cried, catching her breath.
‘I wish to seek your safety and—and, Plautia, it is impossible that I can love you,’ returned he, wringing the tardy words out of his heart.
She caught her hand away and struck it against her breast, and reared her form aloft in a moment’s ominous silence.
‘I have demeaned myself, then,’ she gasped, ‘to a man without a heart. I have stooped myself, most likely, to be the butt of a guard-room, and thence of the city—O miserable, weak, blinded fool!’
No tornado ever broke more fiercely and suddenly on a peaceful landscape than the fit of fury on the dull torpor of her disenchanted mind. Shame and the keen anguish of disappointment resolved themselves into a whirlwind of rage. It choked her voice.