"In God's name don't wish that," said I, and drew her gaze on me again in surprise. I moved on my way, the only way my feet could tread. But she darted after me, and laid her hand on my arm. I looked at her in amazed questioning.
"You'll come again, Simon, when—?" The smile would not be denied though it came timidly, afraid for its welcome and distrustful of its right. "When you're better, Simon?"
I longed—with all my heart I longed—to be kind to her. How could the thing be to her what it was to me? She could not understand why I was aghast; extravagant despair, all in the style of a vanquished rival, would have been easy for her to meet, to ridicule, to comfort. I knew all this, but I could not find the means to affect it or to cover my own distress.
"You'll come again then?" she insisted pleadingly.
"No," said I, bluntly, and cruelly with unwilling cruelty.
At that a sudden gust of passion seized her and she turned on me, denouncing me fiercely, in terms she took no care to measure, for a prudish virtue that for good or evil was not mine, and for a narrowness of which my reason was not guilty. I stood defenceless in the storm, crying at the end no more than, "I don't think thus of you."
"You treat me as though you thought thus," she cried. Yet her manner softened and she came across to me, seeming now as if she might fall to weeping. But at the instant the door opened and the saucy maid who had ushered me in entered, running hastily to her mistress, in whose ears she whispered, nodding and glancing the while at me.
"The King!" cried Nell, and, turning to me, she added hastily: "He'd best not find you here."
"I ask no better than to be gone," said I.
"I know, I know," she cried. "We're not disturbed! The King's coming interrupts nothing, for all's finished. Go then, go, out of my sight." Her anger seemed to rise again, while the serving-girl stared back astonished as she passed out. But if she went to stay the King's coming, she was too late. For he was in the doorway the instant she had passed through; he had heard Nell's last speech, and now he showed himself, asking easily,