The afternoon became full, and waned to dusk as we sat together. We said little; there were no arrangements made; we seemed in a way cut off from the world outside, and from the consideration of it. The life which we must each lead, lives in the main apart from one another, had receded into distance, and went unnoticed; we had nothing to do save to be together; when we were together there was little that we cared to say, no protestations that we had need to make. There was between us so absolute a sympathy, so full an agreement in all that we gave, all that we accepted, all that we abandoned. Doubts and struggles were as though they had never been. There is a temptation to think sometimes that things so perfectly justify themselves that conscience is not discrowned by violence, but signs a willing abdication, herself convinced. For passion can simulate right, even as in some natures the love of right becomes a turbulent passion in the end, like most of such, destructive of itself.
"Then I am yours, and you are mine? And the Embassy is Wetter's?"
"The Embassy is whose you like," she cried, "if the rest is true."
"It is Wetter's. Do you know why? That everybody may know how I am yours."
She did not refuse even the perilous fame I offered.
"I should be proud of it," she said, with head erect.
"No, no; nobody shall breathe a letter of your name," I exclaimed in a sudden turn of feeling. "I will swear that you had nothing to do with it, that you hate him, that you never mentioned it."
"Say what you like," she whispered.
"If I did that, I should say to all Forstadt that there's no woman in the world like you."
"You needn't say it to all Forstadt. You haven't even said it to me yet."