“Go?” At the startled echo he raised his head.
“What else?” he asked. “Did you think that I would stay?”
“But I do not want you to go.” Her lips were white, but she spoke very clearly.
Stephen Fane never moved, but his eyes, dark and wondering, rested on her like a caress.
“Oh, my little Loveliness, what dream is this?”
“You must not go away again; you must not.”
“I am baser than I thought,” he said, very low. “I have made you pity me, I who forfeited your lovely pity this long time. It cannot even touch me now. I have sat here like a dark Othello telling tales to a small white Desdemona, and you, God help me, have thought me tragic and abused. You shall not think that. In a few minutes I will be gone; I’ll not have you waste a dream on me. Listen; there is nothing vile that I’ve not done—nothing, do you hear? Not clean sin, like murder; I’ve cheated at cards, and played with loaded dice, and stolen the rings off the fingers of an Argentine Jewess who——” His voice twisted and broke before the lovely mercy in the frightened eyes that still met his so bravely.
“Why, Stephen?”
“So that I could buy my dreams. So that I could purchase peace with little dabs of brown in a pipe-bowl, little puffs of white in the palm of my hand, little drops of liquid on a ball of cotton. So that I could drug myself with dirt—and forget the dirt and remember England.”
He rose to his feet with that swift grace of his, and Daphne rose, too, slowly.