She had turned her head aside and was looking through the window at the snow in the courtyard, as though determined not to listen. Disturbed by her contempt, her stubborn silence, he paused in his explanations to exclaim: 'Do you know you are prettier than ever?'
She did in fact look very beautiful, with her creamy pallor and those superb large eyes lighting up her face. Her heavy tresses of jet black hair crowned her head as with a diadem of eternal mourning.
'Come,' said Goliath, 'be a little more amiable! You must know that I don't want to harm you. If I didn't still love you I shouldn't have come back, of course not. But now that I'm here and everything is settling down we'll be good friends again; we'll make it all up, won't we?'
She abruptly drew back and looked him full in the face: 'Never!'
'Why never? Aren't you virtually my wife already, isn't that child ours?'
Without taking her eyes off him, she slowly answered: 'Listen; it is best to have done with it at once. You knew Honoré; I loved him, I never loved any one but him. And he is dead; you killed him over yonder. Never again will I be yours—never!'
She had raised her hand, and she swore her vow in a voice ringing with such bitter hatred that for a moment he remained quite amazed, merely muttering: 'Yes, I knew it. Honoré is dead. He was a very nice fellow certainly, but it can't be helped; others are dead too. Such is war. And, besides, it seemed to me that as he was dead there could be no further obstacle—for you must let me remind you, Silvine, I was not brutal with you——'
He did not finish his sentence, however; such a look of wild distracting agony appeared upon her face, to which she raised her hands as though to lacerate it.
'Oh! it is that—yes, that which drives me mad!' she exclaimed. 'That I should have yielded when I did not love you! I cannot remember, I was so sad, so ill after Honoré's departure, and you talked about him and appeared to like him. 'Twas that perhaps which brought it to pass. O God! how many nights have I spent in weeping over my fault!—Yet he came back, and forgave me, and told me that if you Prussians did not kill him, he would marry me all the same, as soon as he got his discharge. And you think that after that I could consent to become yours? Ah, no! under the axe I should still answer no, no, never!'
This time Goliath became gloomy. He divined that her fierce resolution was a firm one. But, on the other hand, he considered himself to be the master, and if he did not as yet seek to impose his will by violent means, it was because he was naturally inclined to prudence, instinctively prone to artifice and patience. This big-fisted Colossus was not partial to blows. And accordingly he bethought himself of another means of forcing her to submit.