His voice was wonderfully soft and persuasive, and for a single instant she admitted the possibility into her mental future; but the instant after it found itself driven violently forth again.
“No, no,” she cried, forcibly, “I will not—I cannot. I never want another husband.”
He hesitated one step in his gait and then went on as before.
“I do not say that all would be as you wished,” he said slowly, with pauses between, “or that I would live only to joy your life. That would be very untrue. To be with you this week I put aside as it would not be right for me to put aside again. These days I have throw away because I will not say all in my after life that I did not try.” He stopped and his voice changed strangely. “I must try with all my strength,” he continued, drawing each breath as if in great pain; “I must, because to me with my work it is what does not trouble, what gives me sympathy, that is the most large of all. I have never marry because I know that so well. How could I ever do my work if a single discord is there to fret—fret—fret? As well ask me to play in concert on an untuned instrument. To my ear the untune is agony; to my music, a discord in my day is death to what would have been written that day. It is so that I have come to expect to never marry. My music must be first, and how can I risk—” he stopped his speech and his steps. She tried to move on but he held her still. “But,” he said, very low but with an accent the intensity of which cut into her very heart, “but now I know that better work would be if you were there; I should have greater force; I should—I—if you loved—”
He trailed his speech helplessly, faltered, and was silent. The night had come heavily down and they learned the fact by the discovery that they could no longer look into the eyes of one another. The quiet little street had led them down to the borders of the Englischergarten, and its forest rose up before them. He led her straight towards it.
“It will be wet,” he said, in reply to the resistance in her arm; “but we must be alone until I have finished all that I will to say. The trees about us are best; we do not want cabs and streets just now.”
She felt blindly, miserably wretched.
“I don’t want to be married again,” she declared in a voice that was thick with more tears; and then she gathered her skirt well into her hand and they plunged together into the darkness beyond.
The park was dusk with night’s downfall and heavily misted by the day’s rain. Its paths, usually like hard gray cement, were a slippery mosaic of clay and brown leaves, and on either hand arose a stockade-like effect of tree-trunks knowing no light beyond. Wind there was none to rustle the leaves, nor sound of bird or beast. An utter and complete silence echoed the footfalls of these two who had come into the solitude, to the end that they might search there for a solution of themselves.
At the first forking of their way, Rosina said timidly: