"So those are your plans," he remarked calmly.
"Yes. Can you suggest anything better?"
"I can suggest something a thousand times better."
She hesitated for a moment. Perhaps she was conscious of a certain alteration in his deportment, the ring of his last words, the slight but unusual air of emotional fervour with which he seemed somehow to have become endowed. A woman of curiously strong virginal instincts, she realised, perhaps for the first time, the approach of a great change in Wingate's attitude towards her. Yet she could not keep from her lips the words which must bring his avowal.
"What do you mean?" she faltered.
"That you end it all," he advised firmly, "that you take your courage in both hands, that you do not return to your husband at all."
"Not return," she repeated, her eyes held by his.
"That you come to me," he went on, bending over the side of her chair. "Needless, wonderful words, but I love you. You were the first woman in my life. You will be the last. I have been silent, as you know. I have waited for something like this, and I think the time has come."
"The time can never come," she cried despairingly.
"The time has come at least for me to tell you that I love you more than any woman on earth," he declared, "that I want to take care of you, to take you into my life, to build a wall of passionate devotion around you, to keep you free from every trouble and every harm."