“I have loved her,” he said quietly.
For the first time in our acquaintance it seemed to me that the count was speaking from that center of feeling that we call the heart. He appeared no longer an irresponsible, almost elfish youth, but a man who, as he himself expressed it, had lived. I was impressed.
“Have you told her?” I asked.
He shook his head murmuring:
“I decide to and I put it off. It is too hard. I fear what I may say.”
A sudden idea took possession of me. Writing it down in cold blood it sounds like the deranged fancy of a lunatic. At the moment when it came, I regarded it not only as a possible solution of all our difficulties, but as an inspiration. My only excuse is that self-preservation is the law of nature. I was drowning and I caught at a straw.
“Do you really love Lizzie Harris?” I asked in a voice tense to the trembling point.
“Very really.”
“More than that other lady, the thin one who wore the fur dress?”
“Much more.”