He found out where she was going for Whitsuntide, but said nothing of his own intentions.
The blindness and madness of love was upon him and held him in complete bondage. The first shock, which her look of the wounded fawn had given him, was over. They had suffered, and made good resolutions, and parted, and now they had met again. And he could not, and would not, think where they might drift to.
To be near her, to look into her eyes, to be conscious of her personality was what he asked at the moment, what he must have. The rest of time was a blank, and meaningless. It is not every man who loves in this way—fortunately for the rest of the world! Many go through life with now and then a different woman merely as an episode, as far as anything but a physical emotion is concerned. Sport, or their own ambitions, fill up their real interests, and no woman could break their hearts.
But Hector was not of these. And this woman had it in her power to make his heaven or hell.
They had both passed through moments of exalted sentiment, even a little dramatic in their tragedy and renunciation, but circumstance is stronger always than any highly strung emotion of good or evil. At the end of their good-bye at Madrid their story should have closed, as the stories in books so often do, with the hero and heroine worked up to some wonderful pitch of self-sacrifice and drama. They so seldom tell of the flatness of the afterwards. The impossibility of retaining a balance on this high pinnacle of moral valor, where circumstance, which is a commonplace and often material thing, decrees that the lights shall not be turned out with the ring-down of the curtain.
Unless death finishes what is apparently the last act, there is always the to-morrow to be reckoned with—out of the story-book. So while exalted—he by his sudden worship of that pure sweetness of soul in Theodora which he had discovered, she by her innocence and desire to do right—they had been able to tune their minds to an idea of a tender good-bye, full of sentiment and vows of abstract devotion, and adherence to duty.
And if he had gone to the ends of the earth that night the exaltation, as a memory, might have continued, and time might have healed their hurts—time and the starvation of absence and separation. But fate had decreed they should meet again, and soon; and all the forces which precipitate matters should be employed for their undoing.
For all else in life Hector was no weakling. He had always been a strong man, physically and morally.
His views were the views of the world. It seemed no great sin to him to love another man's wife. All his friends did the same at one period or another.