“Delilah, don’t laugh, don’t laugh—I’m telling you the laughter is dead in me. I’d rather see you weeping for the poor, blind fool who lost the key to Paradise.”
“Who threw it away,” she amended, touching the violets with light fingers. “But never forget, it’s better not to have set your foot within its gates than to be exiled from it. Never forget that, my tragedian.”
He raised his head, haggard and alert. “Lilah, what do you mean?”
“Why, nothing—only Lucia Dane was here for dinner and she thought it—strange—that you and I should be the gossip of Washington these days. When she had finished with what you had said to her, I thought it strange, too. And I assured her that there would be no more cause for gossip.”
“I was mad when I talked to that little fool,” he told her fiercely. “Clean out of my head trying to fight off your magic. That was the first night—the first night that I owned to myself that I loved you.”
“Your madness seems to be recurrent,” she murmured. “You should take measures against it.”
“I have taken measures. It shall never touch you again. I know now that it has simply been an obsession—a hallucination—anything in Heaven or Hell that you want to call it. You have all my trust, all my faith.”
“It is a terrible thing not to trust a woman,” she said. “More terrible than you know. Sometimes it makes her unworthy of trust.”
“Not you,” he whispered. “Never.”
“We’re delicate machinery, tragedian. Touch a hidden spring in us with your clumsy fingers and the little thing that was ticking away as faithfully and peacefully as an alarm-clock stops for a minute—and then goes on ticking. Only it has turned to an infernal machine—and it will destroy you.”