"We must part, all the same," she whispered. "Think, Lorin. I am your cousin's wife—I have sworn to keep faith with him. How could I meet him and your uncle and all the world and know that I was a cheat and a fraud?"
"I tell you those are mere fancies!" he exclaimed, almost angrily. "But you need never meet these people. I have quite sufficient income for us to live abroad. We should not mind where we went, so long as we were together—should we, dear?"
"No," she cried, rousing herself by a supreme effort and walking away from him, with her hands pressed to her eyes—"no, Lorin; I must not listen, and you must not urge me! You know in your heart that what I said is true, and you know that we must say 'Good-bye.' To-night I shall leave London——"
"Where will you go?"
"I don't know yet. I have to begin a new life alone."
"That you shall never do. Your life belongs to me, as mine to you. Even if all that fancied tale were true, of what value is the promise wrung by fraud from an ignorant child beside the vow made with all her heart by a loving woman? You have given me your word, and you cannot take it back. I will not release you; and wherever you go, Lina, I will follow you!"
He had sprung after her and caught her in his arms, holding her so closely that his grasp hurt her. Laline trembled and cried; but, with all her heart and soul yearning for his caress, she felt powerless to resist him. So they stood a moment, she with her pale cheek pillowed on his breast, while, bending his head, he spoke rapidly and passionately in her ear.
"Does nature count for nothing?" he whispered. "Does it mean nothing that your whole soul asks for me as mine does for you? Does it mean nothing that our ears are dull and dead to other voices, and our nerves unresponsive to other touches, but that when we speak to each other, when my lips meet yours—like this—a very heaven opens to us both? We never meant to love each other, darling, but, as soon as we met, love came! I knew that you must be mine. And, even if your story were true and not an idle dream, what should stand between us? Our love, our life's happiness, on the one side; on the other, a childish promise to a man who does not want you, who does not love you, who is not even aware of your existence. There is no hesitation possible, Lina. Your heart, throbbing with love for me, has answered for you."
She reddened and paled by turns as she listened to his words, and a very intoxication of bliss seemed to rise to her brain as he put the temptation before her. Yet that it was a temptation she knew; and, with only the thought of religion and of her dead mother's teaching to support her, she meant to fight against it. She could not love Lorin the less for wishing to persuade himself that a lie was truth; but the consciousness of her power to make him faithless to his ideals, and his power to make her perjured and foresworn, filled her with something like terror. Inwardly she called on a Higher Power for aid in her weakness; and, as they stood together thus, moved by a very whirlwind of passion, doubt, hope, and despair, neither Laline nor Lorin heard the door softly open to admit a third actor into the scene.
The new-comer was Wallace Armstrong.