Tita suddenly feels very cold, chilled to her heart's core. She had listened so far as if stunned; but now she wakes, and the face of Marian Bethune seems to look with a cold sneer into hers.
"And after that," goes on Hescott, "if—if——" He breaks down.
"Well, if that comes, you know I—love you, Tita."
He tries to take her hand.
"Don't touch me!" says Tita vehemently. She pushes his hand from her; such a disdainful little push. "Oh, I thought you really did love me," says she, "but not like this!" Suddenly a sort of rage and of anger springs to life within her. She turns a face, singularly childish, yet with the sad first break of womanhood upon it, to his. "How dare you love me like this?" says she.
"Tita, listen to me——"
"No. Not I! You must be a fool to talk to me like this. Of what use is it? What good? If you loved me for ever, what good could come of it? I don't love you! Ah!"—she catches her breath and looks straight at him with an undying sense of indignation—"Maurice was right about you, and I was wrong. He saw through you, I didn't. I"—with a little inward glance into her own feelings—"I shan't forgive you for that, either!"
"You mean——"
"It really doesn't matter," says Tita, cruel for the first time in all her sweet young life. The light is so dim that she cannot see his face distinctly. Perhaps if she had, she would have been kinder. "I mean nothing. Only go; go at once! Do you hear?"
Her childish voice grows imperious.
"I am going," says Hescott dully—"in the morning."