“Well, I’ll risk that. But, why did you lose it?”
“He told me—he said—that things ought not to go on any longer between us,” answered the girl, slowly.
“Oh, he said that did he? What if he should be right?”
She started to her feet, and her eyes dilated as she fixed them upon his face; her own turning ghastly white.
“You say that—you? If he should be right?”
Wyvern rose too. The greyness which had superseded the bronze of his face was an answer to her white one.
“I am ruined,” he said. “Is it fair to bind you to a broken and ruined man, one who, short of a miracle, will never be anything else?”
“You mean that? That he might be right?” she repeated.
The ashen hue deepened on his countenance.
“In your own interest—yes. As for me, the day that I realised I should see you no more in the same way, as I see you now—that is as mine—would be my last on earth,” he said, his voice breaking, in a very abandonment of passion and despair. Then with an effort, “But there. It was cowardly of me to tell you that.”