“Let us turn here,” he said eagerly; “by here it will be quiet. Do walk so,” he added pleadingly, as she hesitated, “we have not long to be together. Il faut me gâter un peu. There is but a week left for us.”
She started.
“A week! If we sail the nineteenth we need not leave here until the fourteenth surely.”
“But your cousin will leave on the eighth.”
She looked up at him, and by the light of a street lamp which they were just passing, he saw the great tears starting in her eyes, tears of helplessness, the tears of a woman who feels and cannot speak. It was a very quiet little street, that into which they had turned, with lines of monotonous gray houses on either side, and certainly no better place for tears was ever invented. Rosina’s appeared to know a good thing when they saw it, and rolled heavily downward, thus proving in their passage the sincerity of both her nature and her color. Her companion drew her hand within his own, pressing her fingers hard and fast. He did not say one word, and finally she wiped her eyes, smiled through the mist that hung upon her lashes, and said with simple directness:
“I don’t want to go.”
“I know.”
“But they want me to, and I must.”
There was another long silence, and then he said: