“Say cub, madam.”
“No, I will not,” she said, with a pretty toss of her head, which I noted. “You began like a Neapolitan, but you ended like a hero. And it would have been a very sorry affair to have had blood, or death, or anything unforgetable marring so fair a performance; and there was more besides, which I would fain not tell you.”
“I pray you.” (This was the time at which I, Thomas Trinder, noted what seemed a struggle between hesitancy and archness.) “I pray you,” reiterated Will.
“Must I tell you?” she asked, in the prettiest confusion.
A look of mastery passed over Will’s face. There was no smile of triumph, as there might have been on most young officers’ faces at such a moment; but he showed sufficient to the quick eye of a fencing woman.
“Because I knew, just ere it was too late, that I did not love you, and nothing would have induced me to marry you, and nothing would induce me now,” she added, looking maddeningly lovely, and with a certain softness on her face which might or might not be taken to modify her words.
Will gathered a little hope from this look; for, strange to say, this cartel of defiance and renunciation obliterated the image of Katherine, and made him determine, with all the calm resolution and fierce temper in his nature, that marry her he would.
“But though I cannot, and never would, and could not bring myself to marry you, I desire you to be my dearest friend, as Englishmen can be the friends of women. True, in Sicily there can be no friendship between men and women, because our men are what they are. Therefore a man is never suffered to be alone with a woman until he is irrevocably pledged to marry her—a pledge that can only be revoked by death.”
“And yet you marry such men?”
“Such is our fate. Besides, what is marriage but a licence between a man and a woman?”