"Victor," she began without preamble, laying her arm across his shoulders and pressing her cheek to his hair. "Will you forgive me? I—I love you."
Then she broke down and cried in an old-fashioned and weakly feminine way that she could not combat, although she quite realised its absolute inappropriateness to her character.
"How could you?" he whispered, holding her close with the greatest tenderness, the torturing formula of yesterday coming to his lips. "How could you?"
His eyes, too, were wet, but her breakdown had given him his strength back. "I thought you did not care."
"Not care!"
"But you said so," he persisted, manlike.
"Victor—you don't know how much I love you, and I don't know how I can be such a brute as I am. But—it hurts me the worst. It—it kills me. Say you forgive me."
"Dear child—I forget," he answered, as gently as a father. And Félicité, on her way upstairs, heard him through the half-open door, and smiled.