Genevieve is right; most certainly the best thing Lafcadio can do now is to be conveniently submissive; he will realise this sooner or later and that every other issue is closed to him.... Vexatious, though, that that milksop of a Julius should have been the first to tell him so.
“Are you repeating that by heart?” said he angrily. “Can it be you speaking like that?”
He dropped her arm which he had been holding and pushed it from him; and as Genevieve drew back, there swelled up in him a blind feeling of resentment against Julius, a desire to get Genevieve away from her father, to drag her down, to bring her nearer to himself; as he lowered his eyes he caught the sight of her bare feet in their little silk slippers.
“Don’t you understand that it’s not remorse that I’m afraid of, but....”
He left the bed, turned away from her and went to the open window; he was stifling; he leant his forehead against the glass pane and cooled his burning palms on the iron balustrade; he would have liked to forget that she was there, that he was near her.
“Mademoiselle de Baraglioul, you have done everything that a young lady could be expected to do for a criminal—possibly a little more. I thank you with all my heart. You had better leave me now. Go back to your father, your duties, your habits.... Good-bye. Who can tell whether I shall ever see you again? Consider that when I give myself up to-morrow, it will be to prove myself a little less unworthy of your affection. Consider that.... No, don’t come nearer.... Do you think that a touch of your hand would suffice me?”
Genevieve would have braved her father’s anger, the world’s opinion and its contempt, but at Lafcadio’s icy tones, her heart fails her. Has he not understood, then, that to come and speak to him like this at night, to confess her love to him like this, requires courage and resolution on her part too, and that her love deserves more, maybe, than a mere “thank you”?... But how can she tell him that she too, up till to-day, has been living and moving in a dream—a dream from which she escapes only now and then among her poor children at the hospital, where, binding up their wounds in sober earnestness, she does seem sometimes to be brought into contact with a little reality—a petty dream, in which her parents move beside her, hedged in by all the ludicrous conventions of their world—and that she can never succeed in taking any of it seriously, either their behaviour or their opinions, or their ambitions or their principles, or indeed, their persons themselves? What wonder, then, that Lafcadio had not taken Fleurissoire seriously? Oh! is it possible that they should part like this? Love drives her, flings her towards him. Lafcadio seizes her, clasps her, covers her pale forehead with kisses.
Here begins a new book.
Oh, desire! Oh, palpable and living truth! At your touch the phantoms of my brain grow dim and vanish.
We will leave our two lovers at cockcrow, at the hour when colour, warmth and light begin at last to triumph over night. Lafcadio raises himself from over Genevieve’s sleeping form. But it is not at his love’s fair face, nor her moist brows, nor pearly eyelids, nor warm parted lips, nor perfect breasts, nor weary limbs—no, it is at none of all this that he gazes—but through the wide-open window, at the coming of dawn and a tree that rustles in the garden.