Thérèse murmured:
“Outside this marriage, do you see any other solution?”
“No, mademoiselle!” Boerzell replied feverishly.... “I am neither related nor allied to you.... I have no hold on your father.” He sighed deeply: “And to think that I would throw myself into the fire for your sake! I would sacrifice everything for you, anything that you might ask me to—and see now to what I am reduced!... To sending you away as if you were a beggar, a stranger come to beg from me!... I have not even the consolation of giving you my advice left.... Your father is the master.... You have nothing to do but to bow, and to let him go if he so wishes.”
Thérèse was worn out; her head leaning against the back of the divan, she began to cry in her handkerchief.
“And now you are crying!” pursued Boerzell. “And I am compelled to let you cry.... If I only dared to come close to you and to take your hands in mine without your permission, I would at once become hateful to you.... A friend, yes, but a friend with whom one keeps on distance, and whom one would treat as the very opposite of a gentleman if he made the slightest show of love!”
“No, M. Boerzell!...” Thérèse stammered between two sobs. “You are exaggerating.... It is true that I have been hard to you.... But I like you very much ... very much more than I did.”
He paused to look at her. She eyed him with sympathy in her gray eyes, which were full of tears. With an unconscious movement of tenderness, she stretched out her hand to him. He fell back a step, he was so surprised; then he seized Thérès hand and, without kneeling down, without any such demonstration usually made by a lover who has just been accepted, he said in a halting voice which betrayed the intensity of his emotion:
“What! mademoiselle!... Am I mistaken? Do I understand the meaning of your words? You might be willing, you are consenting?”
“I do know,” sighed Mlle. Raindal, oppressed by discouragement, and withal touched by his anxiety. “Later, perhaps.... I shall see....”
“Oh, thank you!” Boerzell exclaimed, as he pressed the feverish hand of his visitor ardently. “Thank you, mademoiselle.... You will see.... You will see how much I shall try to make you happy and contented....”