"I have tried to, even against difficulties. Come what may, Lilith, you shall never be free from the spell of this love of ours. All thoughts of other love shall be flat, and stale, and dead; and now, when I am gone, your whole soul shall ache and throb with a sense of loss—love and pain intertwined—yet not one pang of the latter would you forego, lest it should lessen the rapturous keenness of the former in the minutest degree. This is what you have caused me to suffer by reason of your stony self-command up till this morning. Now you shall suffer it too."
His tones were calm, even almost stern as those of a judge pronouncing sentence. Lilith, drinking in every word, felt already that every word was true. That sense of love and pain was already in possession of her soul, and would retain possession until all capacity for feeling was dulled and dead.
"You were cruel to draw my very soul out of me as you have done—to force me to love you as I do," she answered—"cruel and pitiless."
"What then? I was but carrying out the program of life. It is that way. But tell me, would you have preferred that I had not done it—that I had passed by on the other side?"
"Oh, my Laurence, no! No, no—ten thousand times no! The mere recollection of such an hour as this is worth a life-time of the awful pain of loss of which you speak and which is around me already."
"That was my own judgment when I first recognized that a strong mutual 'draw' was bringing us together. I foresaw this moment, and deliberately acquiesced in fate."
Now the soft waves of her hair swept his face, now the satin smoothness of her cheek lay against his. Lips met lips again and again, and never for a moment did the clasp of that firm embrace relax. The dead blank hopelessness of life and its conditions, then, had still contained this, had culminated in this? As he thus held her to him, as though he would hold her forever, some dreamy brain-wave seemed to carry Laurence's mind into the dim and somewhat awesome vistas of the future, to bring it face to face with death in varying and appalling forms. What mattered! The recollection of this farewell hour here, in the half-shaded room, with its subtile fragrance of flowers and mysterious light, would be with him then. Such an hour as this would be a crowning triumph to the apex of life. Better that life should end than lengthen out to witness a decline from this apex.
As Lilith had said, he was cruel and pitiless in his love. What then? It was characteristic of him. Had not all experience taught him that the slightest weakness, the slightest compunction, was that faulty link which should snap the chain, be the latter never so massively forged? He remembered how they had held discussion as to whether right might ensue from what was wrong in the abstract. He remembered the cold, hard imprint of the revolver-muzzle against his forehead, the increasing pressure of his thumb upon the trigger, then the thought of Lilith's love had come in as a hand stretched forth to snatch him from the jaws of death. And it had so snatched him. What were the mere conventional rules of abstract right or wrong beside such an instance of cause and effect? Old wives' fables.
They were standing up, face to face, looking into each other's eyes. The hour was late now. Any moment the household might return. Both desired that the last farewell should take place alone. Not for the sake of a few more precious moments would they run the risk of being cheated out of that last farewell.