"But," begins Mona, feebly, hardly sure of her blessed release.
"Keep your kiss," exclaims he, savagely, "since it cost you such an effort to give it, and keep the parchment too. It is yours because of my love for you."
Ashamed of his vehemence, he stoops, and, raising the will from the ground, presents it to her courteously. "Take it: it is yours," he says. Mona closes her fingers on it vigorously, and by a last effort of grace suppresses the sigh of relief that rises from her heart.
Instinctively she lowers her hand as though to place the document in the inside pocket of her coat, and in doing so comes against something that plainly startles her.
"I quite forgot it," she says, coloring with sudden fear, and then slowly, cautiously, she draws up to view the hated pistol he had left in the library the night before. She holds it out to him at arm's length, as though it is some noisome reptile, as doubtless indeed she considers it. "Take it," she says; "take it quickly. I brought it to you, meaning to return it. Good gracious! fancy my forgetting it! Why, it might have gone off and killed me, and I should have been none the wiser."
"Well, I think you would, for a moment or two at least," returns he, smiling grimly, and dropping the dangerous little toy with some carelessness into his own pocket.
"Oh, do take care!" cries Mona, in an agony: "it is loaded. If you throw it about in that rough fashion, it will certainly go off and do you some injury."
"Blow me to atoms, perhaps, or into some region unknown," says he, recklessly. "A good thing, too. Is life so sweet a possession that one need quail before the thought of resigning it?"
"You speak as one might who has no aim in life, says Mona, looking at him with sincere pity. When Mona looks piteous she is at her best. Her eyes grow large, her sweet lips tremulous, her whole face pathetic. The role suits her. Rodney's heart begins to beat with dangerous rapidity. It is quite on the cards that a man of his reckless, untrained, dare-devil disposition should fall madly in love with a woman sans peur et sans reproche.
"An aim!" he says, bitterly. "I think I have found an end to my life where most fellows find a beginning."