'Exactly,' said Hugo.
He insisted on giving me tea. I was treated, in fact, like a princess; but during tea he said nothing to me that might not have been said before a roomful of people. After tea he left me for a few moments, in order, as he said, to give some orders to his servants. Up till then he had been extremely agitated, and when he returned he was even more agitated. He walked to and fro in that lovely drawing-room of his—just as you were doing here not long since. I was a little afraid.'
'Afraid of what?' demanded Hugo.
'I don't know—of him, lest he might do something fatal, irretrievable; something—I don't know. And then, being alone with him in that palace of a place! Well, he burst out suddenly into a series of statements about himself, and about his future, and his intentions, and his feelings towards me. And these statements were so extraordinary and so startling that I could not think he had invented them. I believed them, as I had believed in the sincerity of his threat to kill himself if I would not listen to him.'
'And what were they—these statements?' Hugo inquired.
Camilla waved aside the interruptions, and continued: '"Now," he said, "will you marry me? Will you marry me now?"'
She paused and glanced at Hugo, who observed that her eyes were filling with tears.
'And then?' murmured Hugo soothingly.
'Then I agreed to marry him.'
And with these words she cried openly.