‘My poor girl!’ he said at length. ‘If you had refused me, if you had even judged me, I intended to warn you plainly that it meant my death; and if that failed, I should have gone to the office and shot myself.’
‘Do not say such things,’ I entreated him.
‘But it is true. The revolver is in my pocket. Ah! I have made you cry! You’re frightened! But I’m not a brute; I’m only a little beside myself. Pardon me, angel!’
He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour. He did not understand me. He did not suspect the risk he had run. If I had hesitated to surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should never have surrendered. I knew myself well enough to know that. I had a conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man! But I forgave him. Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.
‘Carlotta,’ he said, ‘we shall leave everything. You grasp it?—everything.’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Of all the things we have now, we shall have nothing but ourselves.’
‘If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see you again.’
Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He meant what he said.
‘It is no sacrifice for me,’ I murmured. ‘The sacrifice would be not to give up all in exchange for you.’
‘We shall be exiles,’ he went on, ‘until the divorce business is over. And then perhaps we shall creep back—shall we?—and try to find out how many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.’