“What is it, Raoul?—why do you look like that?” I asked; while inside my head another question sounded like a shriek. “What if some word had come to him in the theatre—about the treaty?”
Then I could have cried as a child cries, with the snapping of the tension, when he answered: “It was only that terrible last scene, darling. I’ve seen you die in other parts. But it never affected me like this. Perhaps it’s because you didn’t belong to me in those days. Or is it that you were more realistic in your acting to-night than ever before? Anyway, it was awful—so horribly real. It was all I could do to sit still and not jump out of the box to save you. Prince Cyril was a poor chap not to thwart the villain. I should have killed him in the third act, and then Hélène might have been happily married, instead of dying.”
“I believe you would have killed him,” I said.
“I know I should. It’s a mistake not to be jealous. I admit that I’m jealous. But such jealousy is a compliment to a woman, my dearest, not an insult.”
“How you feel things!” I exclaimed. “Even a play on the stage—”
“If the woman I love is the heroine.”
“Will you ever be blasé, like the rest of the men I know?” I laughed, though I could have sobbed.
“Never, I think. It isn’t in me. Do you despise me for my enthusiasm?”
“I only love you the more,” I said, wondering every instant, in a kind of horrid undertone, how I was to get him away.
“I admit I wasn’t made for diplomacy,” he went on. “I wish, I had money enough to get out of it and take you off the stage, away into some beautiful, peaceful world, where we need think of nothing but our love for each other, and the good we might do others because of our love, and to keep our world beautiful. Would you go with me?”