"Think what I have gone through. You have only suffered for a few minutes, I have suffered for three long days. Think of it. My heart was breaking all the time. I went to London hoping to escape thought, and never shall I forget what I endured in that detestable city. Like a man in a dream I lived, scarcely seeing, or, if seeing, only trying to elude, those I knew. At times——"
"You went to London?"
"Yes, that is how I have been absent for three days; I have hardly slept or eaten since last I saw you."
Here Cecilia is distinctly conscious of a feeling of satisfaction: next to a man's dying for you the sweetest thing is to hear of a man's starving for you!
"Sometimes," goes on Cyril, piling up the agony higher and higher, and speaking in his gloomiest tones, "I thought it would be better if I put an end to it once for all, by blowing out my brains."
"How dare you speak to me like this?" Cecilia says in a trembling voice: "it is horrible. You would commit suicide? Am I not unhappy enough, that you must seek to make me more so? Why should you blow your brains out?" with a shudder.
"Because I could not live without you. Even now,"—reproachfully,—"when I see you looking so coldly upon me, I almost wish I had put myself out of the way for good."
"Cyril, I forbid you to talk like this."
"Why? I don't suppose you care whether I am dead or alive." This artful speech, uttered in a heart-broken tone, does immense execution.
"If you were dead," begins she, forlornly, and then stops short, because her voice fails her, and two large tears steal silently down her cheeks.