“I had started to quote to you something that Fenton said. Do you care to hear it?”
His voice was almost hard with the effort he made to control its trembling.
“Yes,” she murmured, looking up at him, in her eyes a mute appeal, an unspoken prayer to his nobler self.
“‘The glory of a renunciation,’ said my friend, ‘lies in the strength of the temptation.’”
She put her cold, trembling hand into his and their eyes met.
“Please go,” she whispered. “If you care for me at all you will do as I ask.”
She withdrew her hand, and Richard turned away as if determined to do as she had requested. For a moment he saw himself in his true character,—an impressionable, impetuous man, inexperienced in the ways of the world, and easily influenced by his surroundings. He saw himself casting meaning glances at a dark-eyed girl in an unconventional restaurant. Then the remorse and self-loathing that had come over him as he knelt in prayer in the sombre shadows that haunted a church-pew returned for an instant, and he felt an irresistible desire to prove, for his own satisfaction, that the higher aspirations that had dominated him later on were not mere fleeting fancies. He turned and reseated himself in the chair at her side.
“Forgive me for what I’ve said,” he implored, his voice low and firm; “I dare not leave you now. It will drive me mad to reflect that I have been unkind to you. I have been very selfish. Let me have at least one more chance to prove that I can be your friend.”
She smiled sadly, and turning to the instrument played softly the refrain of Heine’s melancholy song.
The impotence of longing, the futility of rebellion, were emphasized in Richard’s restless mind as he recalled the words of the poem she had set to music. What availed it that the pine-tree craved the palm? The inexorable fiat of a universe controlled by laws as pitiless as they are unchangeable had decreed that only in dreams should its love find satisfaction.