“I told you to dispense with the asterisks,” he reminded her. “How dare you tease me with this obsolete trick?”
Dolores lifted her face. In the radium glow of his vicious expectations it gleamed with unthinkable chastity.
“I have not meant to tease or trick you,” she said. “I have done my best to entertain—have plotted and planned my story like the writer of a book—have rehearsed my lines each day like an actress before her opening night. Every little treasured phrase and word I have given you, just as learned by heart at the time and re-learned in my afterthoughts. I’ve tried—tried. But I find that I cannot go on. No true woman-soul could. What happened was between ourselves and——”
“Watch your words! For the infidel you boast yourself, you’re quite too free with the name of a certain Potentate. Besides, aren’t you flattering the Great-I-Am? I miss my guess if what happened wasn’t between yourselves and me.”
Dolores’ timidity left her at the suggestion. “I am sure Your Lowness had nothing to do with—with that night. Otherwise it would not seem so wrong to tell it here—such an injustice to John. The fault was not his. It was mine—all mine. I did what he implored me not to do. I urged myself upon him beyond his strength. The only excuse for me is that, with all I had known of mortal man, I really did not understand. And he—he had felt so safe in his sorrow.”
Half-rising, she clutched the table for support and gazed along the double file of spectral faces. The leer on the lips of him nicknamed Old Original aroused her to further defense.
“Perhaps our mateship was not meant to be gainsaid. Perhaps the races of the mortal world would be worthier their fair lands if right were not made wrong by mortal laws—if only the Maker whom John questioned need be obeyed. Perhaps He meant that the crave to be satisfied of all true love should compensate for His inexorable law that man must die.”
At the shriek of derision that greeted her thought, she lifted her head and eyes in a transport of humble defiance.
“Whatever the perhaps and perhaps, I do not regret. The proof of what I felt for John I never shall regret. If I did wrong it was in caring for him and that I could not help. Love’s first and best impulse is to bestow. I knew that I belonged to him and I wanted him to know. I am glad—glad that I told him. The way I gave the knowledge was called a crime—the only crime on earth not judged by motive and circumstance. Surely on that Day when justice becomes absolute, I shall not be blamed. What is a whispered confession, a lingering kiss, an abandoned embrace, to be quibbled over by Him said to have made us and all that we are from the impulse of love divine? Did not He Himself decree that love must be served?”
“She-fiend, you overstep yourself!”