"I would cut off my hands for you. But you are asking me to do something I think wrong."
"Wrong! What is wrong?—and what is right? They are only words. Is it right that I should be left like this?—thrown away like a broken plate? Oh, I shall not rest till I know who it was that took him from me. And you are the only person who can help me. Are you not a little sorry for me? Is there nothing I can do to make you sorry?"
"You won't realise what you are asking me to do."
He spoke in a constrained voice, for he felt the impossibility of standing out much longer against her. Louise caught the note of yielding, and taking his hand in hers, laid it against her forehead.
"Feel that! Feel how it throbs and burns! And so it has gone on for hours now, for days. I can't think or feel—with that fever in me. I must know who it was, or I shall go mad. Don't torture me then—you, too! You are good. Be kind to me now. Be my friend, Maurice Guest."
Maurice was vanquished; in a low voice he told her what she wished to hear. She read the syllables from his lips, repeated the name slowly after him, then shook her head; she did not know it. Letting his hand drop, she went back to the sofa.
"Tell me everything you know about her," she said imperiously. "What is she like?—what is she like? What is the colour of her hair?"
Maurice was a poor hand at description. Questioned thus, he was not even sure whether to call Ephie pretty or not; he knew that she was small, and very young, but of her hair he could say little, except that it was not black.
Louise caught at the detail. "Not black, no, not black!" she cried. "He had black enough here," and she ran her hands through her own unruly hair.
There was nothing she did not want to know, did not try to force from his lips; and a relentless impatience seized her at his powerlessness.