“It is very terrible—this night,” he said quietly, and as he spoke he found the match-box and there was light again. Then he picked up his umbrella, and they returned down the three flights of stairs. In the lower hall he stopped again.
“We cannot separate like this,” he said, laying his hand upon her arm; “there are doings that one human cannot do. I must speak longer with you before I go. It is not talking to be going ever up and down steps with a wax taper. I know nothing of what I have say since we leave the cab, and here, each minute, any one may enter. When we go out, come with me across to the Hofbrauhaus, and there we will talk for but five minutes, and then you shall return. Your skirt will go very well there. We shall quickly return. Dites ‘oui’.”
The Hofbrauhaus is, as its name indicates, the café, or rather brasserie, of the Court brewery. It is a curious place, the beer of which is backed by centuries of fame, and Von Ibn told no lie when he said that any skirt would do well there.
“Oh, I can’t go,” she said, almost crying in her distress and agitation. “It will do no good; we just suffer more and more the longer we are together. I am miserable and you are miserable, and it takes all my strength to remember that if I yield we shall be very much more miserable in the end. Let me get home!”
She unlocked the large porte as she spoke, and he blew out the taper, pushed it open, held it while she passed through, and then stayed its slam carefully behind her.
Then there was the porte of No. 5 to unlock and the taper to relight, and three more staircases to mount.
“I shall go to-morrow morning,” he said quietly and hopelessly, as they went a second time upon their upward way. “I shall put all the force of my will to it that I go. It is better so. Pourquoi vous vexer avec mon ardent désir pour vous?”
Her heart contracted with a spasm of pain, but she made no reply.
“To meet again will be but more to suffer,” he continued. “I touch at the end of what I am capable to suffer. Why should I distress you for no good to any one? And for me all this is so very bad! I can accomplish nothing. The power dies in me these days. Toute ma jeunesse est prise! I feel myself become old and most desolate. I am content that it is good-bye here.”
It seemed to her that her turn had come to falter, and fail to move, and close her eyes in misery. If—if—only—