“Oh,” she murmured again, and she put her hands before her face. Her eyes were hidden; she had spoken no word of reproach and he could not keep himself from her. He knelt beside her, grasping the chair across, behind her. She was so near that he could have laid his head upon her breast. “Don’t leave me,” he heard his pleading voice, but she seemed so much nearer than his own voice; “or let me come. Everything shall be as you wish and when you wish. Tell me that you care, too; or that you can come to care. Tell me that you can think of me as your husband.”
She was there, with her hidden eyes, within his arms, and inevitably they closed around her, and though he heard her murmur, “Please, please, please,” he could not relinquish her. She was free and he was free. They had cut themselves off from the world. They were alone in the strange city; in the strange, bright, hallucinated room; and he knew from the ache and rapture of her nearness how he had craved it.
But, gently, he heard her say again, “Please,” and gently she put him from her and he saw her face, and her eyes full of grief and gentleness. “Forgive me,” she said.
“My darling. For what?” he almost groaned. “Don’t say you’re going to break my heart.”
She kept her hand on his breast, holding him from her while she looked into his eyes. “It is so beautiful to be loved,” she said, and her voice was still the slow, feeble voice of exhaustion. “Even when one has no right to be. Don’t misunderstand. Even when one may not love back; not in that way. Forgive me; not in that way; my dearest friend.”
“Why mayn’t you love back? Why not in that way? If it’s beautiful, why mayn’t you?”
“Sit there, will you? Yes; keep my hand. How weak I’ve been, and cruel. It can’t be. Don’t you know? Haven’t you seen? It has always been for him. He must be free; but I can never be free.”
“Oh, no. No. That’s impossible,” Oldmeadow said, leaning towards her across the table and keeping her hand in both of his. “I can’t stand that. I could stand your work, your vocation, better. But not Barney, who loves another woman. That’s impossible.”
“But it is so,” she said, softly, looking at him. “Really it is so.”
“No, no,” Oldmeadow repeated, and he raised her hand to his lips and kept it there, a talisman against the menace of her words. “He lost you. He’s gone. I’ve found you and you care for me. You can’t hide from me that you care for me. Just now. For those moments. You were mine.”