“No—to-night—now.” He went to her and sat beside her. He put his arm around her. “I love you—I love you,” he said in a low tone, kissing her. “You—my dearest—how can you be so cruel? Love is best. Let us be happy.”
At the clasp of his arm and the touch of his lips, once so potent to thrill her, she grew cold all over.
What he had thought would be the triumphant climax of his appeal made every nerve in her body cry out in protest against a future spent with him. She would have pushed him away, if she had not pitied him and wished not to offend him. “Don’t ask me to decide to-night,” she pleaded. “Please!”
“But you have decided, dearest. We shall be happy. We shall——”
She gradually drew away from him, and to the surface of her expression rose that iron inflexibility, usually so completely concealed by her beauty and gentleness and sweetness. “If I must decide—if you force me to decide, then—George, my heart is aching with the past, aching with the loneliness that stares horribly from the future. But I cannot, I cannot do as you ask.” And she burst into tears, sobbing as if her heart were breaking. “I cannot,” she repeated. “I must not.”
All the ugliness which years of unbridled indulgence of his vanity had bred in him was roused by her words. Such insolence from a woman, one of the sex that had been his willing, yielding instrument to amusement, and that woman his wife! But he had talked so freely to her of his alleged beliefs in the equality of the sexes, he had urged and boasted and professed so earnestly, that he did not dare unmask himself. Instead, with an effort at self-control that whitened his lips, he said: “You no doubt have reasons for this—this remarkable attitude. Might I venture to inquire what they are? I do not fancy the idea of being condemned unheard.”
“Unheard? I—condemn you unheard! George, do not be unjust to me. You know—you must know—that there was not a moment when my heart was not pleading your cause. Do you think I have not suffered as I saw my love being murdered—my love which I held sacred while you were outraging and desecrating it.”
“It is incredible!” he exclaimed. “Emily, who has been lying to you about me? Who has been poisoning your mind against me?”
“You—George.” She said it quietly, sadly. “No one else in all this world could have destroyed you with me.”
“I do not understand,” he protested. But his eyes shifted rapidly, then turned away from her full gaze, fixed upon him without resentment or anger, with only sorrow and a desire to spare him pain.