‘No,’ she said, ‘I shall spend my winter here, and it will be my last.’ Her eyebrows had a pathetic lift, and her gaze was on the sky, beyond the curtains and the window-panes. ‘Paul! Paul dear! Do one thing for me.’ She turned her frightened appealing brown eyes upon him, and stole her hand softly and timidly into his.
‘Yes, dear,’ he answered. ‘Anything that is in my power—anything.’
She had never seemed so human.
‘I shall not live to plague you,’ said Annette. ‘You are strong and brave and clever, and you have ambitions, you big boy, and I have been a weight about your neck.’
‘No, no, no!’ he cried.
‘Oh yes,’ she answered mournfully. ‘I know it I have seen it all along. But all that will soon be over. Only there is one thing, Paul.’
She stretched out her arms to him, and he bent his head so that she might embrace him. He had always fought in his own heart for the fiction that he loved her, and sometimes he had won in that difficult conflict; now he was sure of it, and he put his arms about her. Was he to lose her just as she revealed herself in this sweet way?
‘Paul,’ she asked him, ‘are you sorry that I am going? Shall you grieve—a little?’
‘You mustn’t talk so, dear,’ said Paul; ‘you break my heart.’
He spoke with a genuine vehemence. He was astonished at the strength of his own feeling.