“For my sake, stay!” she pleaded. “You are—my dear, you do not know how much you are to me.”
He held her at arm’s length, looking into her face. Her eyes were pixie-like—radiant, full of sudden lights and fugitive, light-falling tears. So had he seen her, six-and-twenty years before, when he brought her as a bride to Windyhough. For the moment he was unnerved. She was so young in her blandishment, so swift and eager a temptation. It seemed that, by some miracle, they two were lad and lass again, needing each other only, and seeing the world as a vague and sunlit background to their happiness.
“Ah, you’ll not go!” she said softly. “I knew you would not.”
“Not go?” He stood away from her, crossed to the window that gave him a sight of the last sunset-red above the heath. “You are childish, Agnes,” he said sharply.
“So are all women, when—when they care. I need you here—need you—and you will not understand.”
Sir Jasper laughed, with a gentleness, a command of himself, that did not date from yesterday. “And a man, when he cares—he cares for his honour first—because it is his wife’s. Agnes, you did not hear me, surely. I said that the Prince commands me.”
“And I command you. Choose between us.”
Her tone was harsh. She had not known how frankly and without stint she loved this man. She was looking ahead, seeing the forlornness of the waiting-time while he was absent on a desperate venture.
He came and patted her cheek, as if she were a baby to be soothed. “I choose both,” he said. “Honour and you—dear heart, I cannot disentangle them.”
She felt dwarfed by the breadth and simplicity of his appeal. The world thought her devout, a leal daughter of the Church; but she had not caught his gift of seeing each day whole, complete, without fear or favour from the morrow. And, because she was a spoilt child, she could not check her words.