“No,” she protested. “No! I can’t let you say these things. I ought not to have come out with you. Don’t make me regret coming.”
He was silent for a while after that; and she heard him breathing in hard deep breaths as he walked close by her side. Many emotions stirred him; passion and desire and resentment strove furiously within him, making speech difficult, and defeating his effort after control. The sense of loss, of defeat, weighed bitterly with him. He wanted her so, wanted her with an intensity that resembled hunger—wanted her urgently, savagely, with a crude, primitive, human want that was for setting aside every consideration, every civilised law and code; that was for taking the law into his own hands and making her see eye to eye with himself. And she would not see things as he wished her to. She was difficult. She was altogether too civilised.
He turned to her abruptly, and snapped the silence sharply by hurling an unexpected question at her.
“Why did you come out?” he asked. “What did you expect?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, and drew a little away from him. “I think I wanted to talk to you just once more before—we parted.”
“Oh!” he said, with a short laugh. “So that was it? If that was your only reason you shouldn’t have come. I’m not intending to part—like that anyhow. I wanted to talk to you on quite another subject. You were stolen from me. I’m for stealing you back. I haven’t any scruples—of that kind Mine was the greater injury. I love you. You love me. You can’t deny that, Prudence.”
Prudence made no attempt to deny it. She faced him fully in the moonlight with her steady eyes lifted to his in saddened appeal. He realised the quiet strength of her nature with a sense of impotent anger in feeling it opposed to his will. There was going to be a fight in any case and the issue appeared uncertain.
“Whether we love one another or not,” she said, “we have to bear in mind that I am married.”
She was indeed more conscious of the fact at the moment than of any other. She felt the necessity of impressing it upon him. But Steele needed no reminding. The rage in his heart leapt up at her words like a flame fed by some combustible fluid. He seized her roughly in his arms and rained hot kisses upon her mouth.
“But you don’t love him?” he breathed. “You don’t love him?” He stared at her as she pushed his face back, and laughed harshly. “God! Do you suppose I’m not bearing it in mind?—every moment since I learned the truth from your lips? It’s like murder in my heart, that knowledge. I’d like to kill him. I could have struck him in the face that night when he came in and found us together, and took you away. And he knows... He knows that only the legal tie binds you to him. I saw the knowledge in his eyes. He doesn’t trust you. If he knew that you were out here, walking with me in the night, he would believe the worst. He’s that type of man. Nothing you could say would convince him otherwise. They are made like that, those narrow, strictly conventional people. They daren’t trust their own emotions; they never allow them full play. And they don’t trust any one else. They judge others by their own feeble standards. They aren’t human—it’s sawdust, not blood, in their veins.”