“My dear, my dear,” she whispered, trying to keep her voice free from the coldness of death that lay upon her own spirit.
They sat in silence a space, while waves of misery welled up about them. Then Azalea’s control broke. She covered her face with her hands.
“Don’t!” cried Dilling, sharply. “Don’t! Tell me the truth—do you want me to stay?”
“No!”
Suddenly, he left his chair and knelt beside her, burying his face in the folds of her dress, and groping for her hand. For a time, he could not speak, could not tell how much he loved her, could not articulate the thought that hers was the power to make vocative his life’s stern purpose. He could only cling to her and suffer.
“Azalea,” he cried, at last, “how can I go? I can’t live without you—I’m not even sure that I can die!”
She felt strangled and heard words falling from her lips without understanding how she spoke them. “Are you forgetting the needs of the West—the opportunity for your talents, there? Will you close your ears to the call of your ambition?”
He denied the existence of ambition. It had died when life was stricken from his soul.
She raised his head between her hands. They trembled and were cold.
“Raymond, do you love me?”