"You talk," he went on, "just as if we were heathens, artists, or Bohemians. That doesn't do. We are made of different material. Our blood may be hot too, it is true. Opportunity may turn us into thieves before we know it, but we have always a skeleton in the cupboard in the shape of our infernal protestant conscience----"
"Don't talk of conscience, I entreat you."
"And a certain residuum of what is called sense of duty."
"Ah! why embitter the first confidential hour we are passing together?" she murmured faintly.
"We have no confidential hours to pass together," he answered roughly.
She folded her hands. "My God, I know it, I know all. What I said just now was said to force my own conscience into trying to cheer you.... What good can come of filling each other's ears with lamentations?"
He was silent. How everything was reversed since that morning on the island! She now defended the standpoint that he had then taken up, while he let himself be swayed by consciousness of sin as she had done then. A few minutes before he had feared nothing so much as to hear her lament, now he himself was driving her to it.
"You are right, Lizzie," he said, "we must quietly contain ourselves, and spare each other reproaches, for old sins can't be undone. But the devil take us if we forget the object for which we have entered into this new alliance."
"How, in God's name, could we forget it?" she cried, putting her hands before her face.
He breathed a sigh of relief. Now that their mutual purity of motive had been solemnly attested on both sides afresh, he need no longer be so much on his guard, and might without suspicion and self-reproach give himself up to the charm of this dreaded tête-à-tête.