“Will you come with me?”
“Where will you take me to, Maurice?”
“Down there,” he said, pointing to the lake.
“Hush!” she cried, and recoiled instinctively.
But as on the Calvary of Lemenc the year before, when she had urged him to come away, he in his turn felt a kind of ecstasy in conquering her will.
“Yes, come. Our year of love is dead already. Come, Edith. Already our love is dead. No one will look for us. The water isn’t cold. We’ll let ourselves slip over the edge of a boat. I have no more honour left. Will you come, Edith?”
She took him in both her arms and cried out in a frightened voice:
“No, no, no! Because I love you. When you love you don’t want to die. You lie, you steal, you kill, but you don’t want to die. Lovers who kill themselves don’t love their love.”
He broke loose from her grasp roughly, heedless whether he wounded her or not.
“Let me go,” he cried. “Don’t touch me again. Don’t hold me back.”