He had followed her, and one evening when she was walking alone she had met him. Of course, there had been explanations. He had implored her not to send him away—to let him be always as happy as he had been that month at Liverpool. He met her objections as to the difference in their position by telling her that he was an outcast and an exile, and had no position. Would she not make his hard life a little easier to him? At every word he said she felt her resolutions melting away; but her parents, would they ever consent to her marriage with one who held such opinions as his?
Then he had told her gravely and tenderly that he was at war with society and with most of its conventions, and that for him to marry in the ordinary sense of the word would be to compromise and deny every principle on which his life was founded. The true marriage, he had maintained, was fidelity, and mutual love was more binding than could be a ceremony in which one of the performers did not believe. He loved her he had said, far too dearly to wish to deceive her in the smallest degree about his sentiments, and so he felt bound to tell her that to him a legal marriage would be for ever impossible. In spite of that, would she not be noble enough to trust her life entirely to him, and be his wife?
This had been so completely unexpected as to be a great shock to her, and she had felt at once that, however she might decide, it would be out of the question to tell or ask her parents about it. Her choice lay between them and her lover. We know how she chose.
Of her time of happiness she said very little, but her hearer gathered that, though Litvinoff had left her much alone, she had had no reason to doubt that he still cared for her.
But the influence of her early training, though it had sunk into abeyance in the hour of strong temptation, had slowly and surely reasserted itself as the months went by. She had striven still to believe that she was acting rightly, but at last it became impossible to her to persuade herself that she had any right to be a law unto herself. So at last she had left her lover, with no farewell but a letter, in which she had tried to tell him how it was. She had felt a pleasure in the hardness of the life that followed—had vaguely felt it to be in some sort an expiation of her wickedness.
'You see,' she ended, 'if I had believed as he did, perhaps I should have been right to act as I did; but I believed in all the things that he denies, and so I was wrong to dare to take his views of good and bad for me, while all the time I kept my own old thoughts of what was really good and bad. I can't explain myself well, but you see what I mean—don't you?'
'Yes,' answered Petrovitch, rising; 'I see that another life has been sacrificed upon the altar of an abstraction. If it gives you happiness to give yourself pain, at anyrate I should think your wickedness, as you call it, was expiated now. Has he never tried to find you out?'
'He may have tried,' said Alice, 'but he has not succeeded.'
'Would you not go back to him—now that you have another life than your own to think of?'
Alice darted a quick glance at him, and turned very white.