The charm of his earnestness was very great, and she felt that the sudden sensation of faintness which came over her must be visible in her fluttering eyelids and in her trembling hands.
"I haven't faith in a salvation that must be worked out by somebody else," she said, in a voice she made cold by an effort to render it merely careless.
An instant before he had told himself with emphasis that he would go no further, but the chill remoteness from which she looked at him stirred him to an emotion that was not unlike a jealous anger. She seemed to him then more brightly distant, more sweetly inaccessible than she had done at their first meeting.
"Not even when it is a salvation through love?" he asked impulsively, and at the thought that she was possibly less indifferent than she appeared to be, he felt his desire of her mount swiftly to his head.
Her hand went to her bosom to keep down the wild beating of her heart, but the face with which she regarded him was like the face of a statue. "No—because I doubt the possibility of such a thing," she said.
"The possibility of my loving you or of your saving me?"
"The possibility of both."
"How little you know of me," he exclaimed, and his voice sounded hurt as if he were wounded by her disbelief.
She raised her eyes and looked at him, and for several seconds they sat in silence with only the little space between them.
"It is very well," she said presently, "that I believe nothing that you say to me—or it might be hard to divide the truth from the untruth."