“Are you heartless or are you not?” asked George almost fiercely. “Do you love me that you should care to see me? Or does it amuse you to give me pain? What are you, yourself, the real woman that I can never understand?”
Constance was frightened by the sudden outbreak of passion, and turned pale.
“What are you saying? What do you mean?” she asked in an uncertain voice.
“What I say? What I mean? Do you think it is pleasure to me to talk as we have been talking? Do you suppose that my love for you was a mere name, an idea, a thing without reality, to be discussed and dissected and examined and turned inside out? Do you fancy that in three months I have forgotten, or ceased to care, or learned to talk of you as though you were a person in a book? What do you think I am made of?”
Constance hid her face in her hands and a long silence followed. She was not crying, but she looked as though she were trying to collect her thoughts, and at the same time to shut out some disagreeable sight. At last she looked up and saw that his lean, dark face was full of sadness. She knew him well and knew how much he must feel before his features betrayed what was passing in his mind.
“Forgive me, George,” she said in a beseeching tone. “I did not know that you loved—that you cared for me still.”
“It is nothing,” he answered bitterly. “It will pass.”
Poor Constance felt that she had lost in a moment what she had gained with so much difficulty, the renewal of something like unconstrained intercourse. She rose slowly from the place where she had been sitting, two or three paces away from him. He did not rise, for he was still too much under the influence of the emotion to heed what she did. She came and stood before him and looked down into his face.
“George,” she said slowly and earnestly, “I am a very unhappy woman—more unhappy than you can guess. You are dearer to me than anything on earth, and yet I am always hurting you and wounding you. This life is killing me. Tell me what you would have me do and say, and I will do it and say it—anything—do you understand—anything rather than be parted from you as I have been during these last months.”
She meant every word she said, and in that moment, if George had asked her to be his wife she would have consented gladly. But he did not understand that she meant as much as that. He seemed to hesitate a moment and then rose quickly to his feet and stood beside her.