"You don't?... My views don't seem to matter so tremendously, after all!"
"Ah, Hugo dear! That hurts. How--"
"Tell me, Carlisle, did the idea of telling Colonel Dalhousie, for your happiness, originate with you or with this man?"
Touched once more in her spirit by his singular obsession, she replied, with constraint: "I don't remember, Hugo. Perhaps with him. But it wasn't his saying so that made it true. It is the way I feel ..."
"That brings us back to the beginning again. I have done my best to persuade you that this feeling is an hallucination."
Over and over this ground they went with quickening exchanges, Canning's patience wearing sharper at each circuit, Carlisle growing steadily whiter, but unluckily not more yielding. At last Canning said:
"You are going to trust your whole future life to me, Carlisle. It is hard for me to grasp that you refuse to trust me in this, the first thing I have ever asked of you. Tell me plainly that you mean to have no regard for my wishes."
Carlisle felt ready to scream. How had this miserable misunderstanding arisen? What was it all about? Her mind glanced back, but she could not remember, could not begin to retrace the bewildering steps. Worse yet, she hardly seemed to want to now, for Hugo could not possibly speak to her in this way if he loved her as he had said.
She said in a small, chilled voice: "That's unjust, Hugo. I have every regard--"
"So you say, Carlisle. But nothing else that you say supports it in the slightest."