"Him! Tell him!" she repeated, dazed. "You don't know how much he is to me," she added wistfully. It was no longer the face of a girl that looked up at Repellier. It was that of a woman, touched with age and sorrow.
"That is no reason why his life should be soured and broken, no reason why he should go on in the way he has been doing."
"But they're lies! He would know they were lies!" she cried, her anger seizing her once more.
"He would know they were lies! He knows and believes in me! He loves me! If I told him, he would kill you! But you wouldn't tell him—you wouldn't tell him!" she cried again, reading nothing but relentlessness in the other's face.
Repellier turned away from her, sick of it all, degraded by it, demeaned by her very passionate mendaciousness, but still resolute.
"I will give you two days to think it over," he said wearily, "and then—then I'll act on your decision!"
And she knew that he was in earnest.