"Time will tell," he said sententiously. He leaned over and took her hand in his. "You do love me?"
"You know I do—yes, yes!" she cried from her heart, keeping her face resolutely turned away from him. "I am sick with love for you. Why should I deny the thing that speaks so loudly for itself—my heart! Listen! Can you not hear it beating? It is hurting me—yes, it is hurting me!"
He trembled at this exhibition of released, unchecked passion, and yet he did not clasp her in his arms.
"Will you come into my world, Genevra?" he whispered. "All my life would be spent in guarding the love you would give to me—all my life given to making you love me more and more until there will be no other world for you to think of."
"I wish that I had not been born," she sobbed. "I cannot, dearest—I cannot change the laws of fate. I am fated—I am doomed to live forever in the dreary world of my fathers. But how can I give you up? How can I give up your love? How can I cast you out of my life?"
"You do not love Prince Karl?"
"How can you ask?" she cried fiercely. "Am I not loving you with all my heart and soul?"
"And you would leave me behind if the ship should come?" he persisted, with cruel insistence. "You will go back and marry that—him? Loving me, you will marry him?" Her head dropped upon her arm. He turned cold as death. "God help and God pity you, my love. I never knew before what your little world means to you. I give you up to it. I crawl back into the one you look down upon with scorn. I shall not again ask you to descend to the world where love is."
Her hand lay limp in his. They stared bleakly out into the night and no word was spoken.
The minutes became an hour, and yet they sat there with set faces, bursting hearts, unseeing eyes.