"I dare say many others have loved you, and told you so," he continued, "and I don't ask you how you received their professions. I know the world too well, and what it brings to men and women, for any such folly. That is of the past. The present is ours. I ask you why you have brought me here? A woman who resents such words as those I have spoken to you before now, does not give a man the chance of repeating them. You have not sent for me to tell me that you are insulted and outraged, to talk the cant of a hypocritical society to me. I should not love you, beautiful as you are, if you were such a fool."
He saw that his audacity was not without its charm for her; her head was raised now, and her dark eyes, looking up, met his looking down, as she listened, with parted lips and deep-drawn breath.
"Be sure of this," he said, "no man has ever loved you as I love you, or been willing to stake so much upon your love." The sinister truth which lurked in these words lent the sinister expression to his face again for a moment which she had sometimes seen in it. "How much I stake upon it you will never know. So be it. I am ready, I am willing. You see I am giving you time. I am not hurrying you into rash speech. I dare say you were not at all prepared for this when you and I met, and you took the initiative in what you intended to be an ordinary watering-place flirtation--while you were waiting for Arthur Felton, perhaps?" he said, savagely, for, as he went on, the savage nature of the man was rising within him, and for all that his grasp was on her soft white arm, and his gaze was searching the depths of her dark eyes, he was speaking rather to himself than to her; rather to the unchained devil within, than to the beautiful fatality before him.
"It is possible you had some such notion," he said. "I don't ask you to acknowledge it, for if so, you have abandoned it." He stooped lower, his eyes looked closer into hers. She shrank back, and covered her face with her disengaged hand. "Yes," he went on, in a gentle tone, "I know you soon discovered that I am not made for make-believes; and now--now that you have sent for me, and I am here, what is it that you mean? You cannot make me the pastime of an hour; you cannot shake off the hold which such love as mine lays upon your life--would still lay upon it were you a feebler woman than you are. What then? Are you going to take the wine of life, or are you going to content yourself with the vapid draughts you have hitherto drank? You must tell me, and tell me to-night, what it is you mean; for a crisis in my life is come, and I must know, without paltering or delay, how it is to be dealt with."
He lifted his hand from her arm, and standing directly before her, bade her look up and speak to him. She did not move. Then he sat down on a velvet footstool before her sofa, and drew her hands away from before her face. There were signs of agitation on it, and he read them, not quite correctly perhaps, but to his own satisfaction.
"Listen to me," he said, in the gentlest tones within the compass of his voice. "I have a right--have I not?--to ask you, to know what is your meaning towards me? What did you bring me here for? Remember the words I have spoken to you, not once only, or twice; remember the story I told you on the balcony yonder; remember the tone you have occasionally adopted in all your levity, and then do not attempt to deny my right to speak as I am speaking, and to demand your answer."
"You--you found me alone here--in my own house--and--"
"Absurd!" he cried. "You are talking nonsense, and you know it. Did you not intend me to understand that I should find you alone? Did your note, your summons (I tore it up, but you remember the words as well as I do), mean anything else? Do you not know this is all folly? There is no need to play with me. I am a sure prize or victim, which you please; you know that well enough, and I must know which you do please, for this is, as I said before, a crisis for me. Which is it?" he said, and he held her hands more tightly, and looked at her with a pale face. "Which is it? Mere coquetry--a dangerous game with a man like me I warn you--a game you won't find it possible to play; or--or the deep, deep love of a lifetime--the devotion which will never swerve or falter--the passion which will blot out from your knowledge or your fears everything beyond itself."
Weak, imaginative, without principle, easily ruled by strength, though a despot to weakness, the woman he addressed listened to him like one in a dream. Not until afterwards did a sense of being tricked and trapped come to her. Had her demeanour towards Routh really implied all this! Had she yielded to the rapacity for admiration, to the thirst for conquest, which had always dominated in her nature, once too often, and far too completely? This was precisely what she had done, and she had fallen into the hands of a stronger being than herself. In a blind, vague, groping kind of way she felt this, and felt that she could not help or deliver herself, and felt it with something like fear, even while her imagination and her vanity were intoxicated by the mingling of defiance and pleading in his words, in his tones, and in his looks.
"You and I," he went on, "would say to others, would say to each other in some of our moods, or would have said when first we met, that no such thing as this all-sufficing love exists, but each of us knows well that it does, and may and shall be ours! This is what I mean. Again I ask you, what is your meaning in all this?"