‘Then,’ she said, ‘do this one little thing for me. Whisper. Let me whisper. Can you hear me like that?
‘Yes, sweetheart, yes. What is it?’
‘Make me an honest woman before I die,’ said Annette, in a voice that barely reached him. ‘I was brought up to be a good girl, and I have suffered—oh Paul, dear, I have suffered! Promise me.’
Here were depths he had not looked for or suspected, and he thought within himself how blind he had been; how much he had misread her; how like a doll he had treated her. His whole heart smote him with self-scorn, with pity, with remorse.
‘You are not dying, dear Annette,’ he said; ‘you will live, and we shall love each other a thousand times better than we have ever done before, because this fear of yours has broken the ice between us.’
‘No, Paul,’ she answered. Her arms fell languidly on the counterpane. ‘I shall not live, but promise me that. Let me die happy. Tu sais, chéri, que ma mère est morte. Je voudrais encontrer ma mère au ciel, comme fille honnête, ne c’est pas? Ah! pour l’amour de Dieu, Paul!’
‘My darling,’ he answered, ‘I’ll do it! I’ll do anything. But don’t talk nonsense about dying. We shall have many a happy year together yet.’
It was his facile, ardent way to think of himself as brokenhearted if he lost her, and he had never seen her in such a mood as this before, or anything approaching to it It was no pretence for the moment that he loved her. He felt for the first time that their two hearts were near. And though he had been loyal to her, and through times good, bad and indifferent had brought her of his best, and had done what he could in a cool, husbandly sort of way to make her happy, he knew his moral debt to her, and was sore about it, and had been sore about it often. It had never been in his mind for an instant to evade his burden, even when he had felt the weight of it most heavily, and he was willing and even eager to offer this small and laggard reparation.
‘We have lived here much more than the statutory time,’ he said. ‘I will go and see the district registrar at once, and we will be married at the earliest possible minute. That will only be a legal union, dear, but if you care for anything further we can be married in a church when you get strong enough.’
‘Thank you, Paul,’ she answered. ‘You are good to me.’