"And if I can't?"
"I will force you to. I will tell you what happened on the night of the opera; I will tell you why I have kept away all these days. I will even show you the letter from her that brought me back. You will have to believe."
For the moment nothing seemed to matter to him except that Edith should believe this, and in the silence that followed he watched her face, and marvelled at the change that came there. It was as if it was possible to see the belief penetrating into her brain, and transforming her features, even as the thaws of the spring penetrate into the congealed ground, softening its outlines and bedewing the spear-heads of frozen grass with moisture, that percolates and liquefies the ice-bound tussocks. Even so, Edith, frozen with jealous hate for Elizabeth, melted at the words the truth of which it was impossible to doubt, for the nature of the proofs he offered was the guarantee for them. She had to believe. And this unfreezing melted her; the crust of her hardness was dissolved, and pitiful imperative yearnings welled up from the very springs of her, that pierced and flooded the ground that had been sealed to their outflow. As far as her will went, she banished her bitterness and blame of Elizabeth; she was herself alone with her lover and her love, that was more adamantine than this mere frozen surface of hatred and jealousy had been. Till that crust was dissolved, the inner springs could not flow; now it was melted and they flooded her.
Her fan dropped unregarded at her feet, and she clasped her hands together.
"I believe you," she said. "It is you who—who are responsible. But you don't ask me to release you. That is well, for—for I can't release you. You can refuse to marry me, I suppose. A man can always do that if he has made a girl love him and has asked her to marry him."
He did not answer, and she went on winding and unwinding her fingers.
"You see I love you," she said, "and I can't let you go. And only a few weeks ago you liked me enough anyhow to want me to marry you. You thought you would be very well content to live with me always. I think that was about it. And I felt much the same towards you. Then immediately, when I found you wanted me, I began to love you. And I love you more and more. Before that nothing in the world had meant anything to me. Even if you asked me to let you go, I could not."
Still he said nothing, and she came up close to him, treading on her fan and breaking the ivory sticks of it.
"It would be simply impossible for me," she said. "Do you think that by my own act I could give you up, and let you marry Elizabeth—as I suppose you would do?"
She pointed through the open window at his house next door.