“I thought that I should lose my mind!”
“Ma cherie!”
“But you really look as if you had been ill?”
“Not ill, but most malheureux. It has not been easy always to wait and believe that you shall love me yet.”
“But you always did believe it?”
He smiled his irresistible smile of eyes and lip.
“Your cousin has said to me in Tagernsee, ‘She will certainly marry you because she declares that she will not, and she always does do exactly le contraire;’ but, Mon Dieu, how could I trust to that?”
Rosina laughed ringingly.
“Dear Jack! I wish that I had known myself as well as he knows me.”
“He has been very good to me,” said Von Ibn, leaning above her and breaking his sentences in a manner that was perhaps only natural, all things considered; “he has kept me from—the real madness. But for him I was quite willing to shoot myself. It has never been anything so terrible for me as—when you enter the door of the pension that night and shut it between us.”