"It seems to me it is because the time grows nearer when we must go back to the world. First to dinner with the others, and then—Paris. I would like to stay thus always—just alone with you."
She did not refute this solution of her sadness. She knew it was true. And when he looked into her eyes, the blue was troubled with a mist as of coming tears.
Then passion—more mighty than ever—seized him once more. He only felt a wild desire to comfort her, to kiss away the mist—to talk to her. Ah!
"Theodora!" he said, and his voice vibrated with emotion, while he bent forward and seized both her hands, which he lifted to his face—she had not put on her gloves again after the tea—her cool, little, tender hands! He kissed and kissed their palms.
"Darling—darling," he said, incoherently, "what have I done to make your dear eyes wet? Oh, I love you so, I love you so, and I have only made you sad."
She gave a little, inarticulate cry. If a wounded dove could sob, it might have been the noise of a dove, so beseeching and so pathetic. "Oh, please—you must not," she said. "Oh, what have you done!—you have killed our happy day."
And this was the beginning of his awakening. He sat for many moments with his head buried in his hands. What, indeed, had he done!—and they would be turned out of their garden of Eden—and all because he was a brute, who could not control his passion, but must let it run riot on the first opportunity.
He suffered intensely. Suffered, perhaps, for the first time in his life.
She had not said one word of anger—only that tone in her voice reached to his heart.
He did not move and did not speak, and presently she touched his hands softly with her slender fingers, it seemed like the caress of an angel's wing.