“I wish it need not be; I wish it with all my heart,” he said earnestly. “It is desperately hard for both of us.” He raised her hands to his own shoulders and stood looking down at her. “I only send you away, my dearest, because it is the best for you. You know that, Lucienne, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said the girl dreamily, looking up at him and yet through him.
He tightened his grasp of her hands. “Lucienne, my heart, what is it? You are tired out, and I can’t take care of you. I have got to leave you to a stranger . . . I can't even send Louis with you.”
“I knew that Louis would not be able to leave the King,” said Lucienne, and she gently disengaged herself and sat down. “You should have believed me at the first, Gilbert.”
As he looked at her, sitting there pale but smiling, her spirit, as he conceived it, and her beauty so wrought upon Gilbert that his self-restraint began to give way again, and he walked hastily up and down the room. She was going over the sea, away from him, and he longed to take her back with him to Vendée, to clasp her in his arms and to shower kisses on her little pale face. There was no absolutely valid reason against his doing either of these things, except that the first was not in harmony with what he thought best for her, the second, he had learnt, was not to be yet.
As for Lucienne, she sat still with her eyes fixed almost mechanically upon her lover. She had never in her life seen him so moved, but she had passed beyond the region of surprise or even of acute sensation, and she thought, as far as she could think at all, of a burnt letter.
At last Gilbert came to a stand-still in front of her. “I wish you did not look so tired,” he said under his breath. Then he sat down by her and took her hand in both of his and went on speaking in a voice that showed the restraint which he was putting on himself. “My mother will soon go over to take care of you, I hope, Lucienne; and I am sure you will be happy in Suffolk. You will like my uncle; he is extremely kind, and so are my cousins, George and Amelia.”
Some answer was probably required of her, so she said: “It seems strange that you should have English cousins.”
The Marquis nodded, but was not diverted into enlarging on this relationship, so perhaps he had not expected a remark. He went on to talk a little of the journey, of English habits, of Suffolk, and she could not guess, except that his manner was somehow indefinably different, that, as he described Sir William Ashley’s avenue, he saw himself riding up it to claim her. Yet his thought was almost audible in his voice as he said: “I shall come over myself very soon. It may be that we shall have to be married in England, but you must try not to mind that.”
Lucienne's hand was her own again now, and she looked down at his ring as she twisted it on her finger. “I shall not mind,” she said at length.