“No, there’s nothing, I assure you,” he answered, in quick denial. She must never know, for knowledge of the whole miserable business might bring contempt, and her love for him might be killed. Of all his terrors the terror of losing her love was the most unbearable.
“Come down to dinner, dear,” she persuaded. “It will do you good.” She bent down and looked intently at him as he sat on the edge of the bed, scraping the carpet with his feet and staring at the floor, his eyes wild with alarm. “It isn’t that you are afraid of meeting somebody you don’t want to see, is it?”
His heart seemed to stop beating for a moment as he denied the suggestion. She was beginning to guess, she was beginning to suspect.
“Oh, very well, then,” he said, unable to meet her gaze. “I’ll come down. Perhaps, as you say, it’ll do me good.”
There was the black murk of damnation now in his soul, lit only by the glow of his fighting instinct. The crisis of terror was passing, and now he was determined not to be caught. “Go on down, darling,” he said. “I’ll follow you in a moment.”
She put her arms about him and kissed him, smoothing his forehead with her cool hand. “Whatever it is that is troubling you,” she whispered, “remember always that I love you, and shall go to my grave loving you and you only.”
He closed his eyes, and for a while his head lay upon her breast, like that of an exhausted child. All the brawn of life had been knocked out of him. Every hope, every dream, every vestige of content had gone from him; and in these pitiable straits he desired only to shut out the world, and to obtain, if but for a moment, a respite from the horror of actuality.
As soon as he was alone he went to his portmanteau, and took from it his revolver, which he loaded and placed in his pocket. His intention had been to appear to meet with an accidental death, but if he had left it now till too late, he would have to blow his brains out. A Bedouin wanderer such as he, he muttered to himself, must, at any rate, never be taken alive: a son of the open road must never be led captive.
For a moment he stood irresolute at the open door of his room, and the sweat gleamed upon his forehead. Then he braced himself, and walked down the stairs. Monimé was not far ahead of him, and, as he turned the corner to descend the last flight which led down into the front hall, she paused at the foot of the steps to wait for him.