She hid her face on his shoulder.
“I will do what you wish,” she said.
“But I want to know your wish.”
She clung closer to him.
“Michael, I don’t think I could bear to part with you if we were married,” she said. “It would be worse, I think, than it’s going to be. But I intend to do exactly what you wish. You must tell me. I’m going to obey you before I am your wife as well as after.”
Michael had long debated this in his mind. It seemed to him that if he came back, as might easily happen, hopelessly crippled, incurably invalid, it would be placing Sylvia in an unfairly difficult position, if she was already his wife. He might be hideously disfigured; she would be bound to but a wreck of a man; he might be utterly unfit to be her husband, and yet she would be tied to him. He had already talked the question over with his father, who, with that curious posthumous anxiety to have a further direct heir, had urged that the marriage should take place at once; but with his own feeling on the subject, as well as Sylvia’s, he at once made up his mind.
“I agree with you,” he said. “We will settle it so, then.”
She smiled at him.
“How dreadfully business-like,” she said, with an attempt at lightness.
“I know. It’s rather a good thing one has got to be business-like, when—”