"What is it you desire?" De Violaine asked in a low voice, his eyes fixed on the other.
"To see her once again. To bid her one last farewell, to hold her in my arms for the first and last time. You know, you must know, that our love grew from out this attempt for which I am now to suffer; that, even as the knowledge came to both our hearts that the love was there, so, too, the parting, the end was at hand. Ah! if to you the love for a woman has ever come, if it has ever so fortuned that you should love and lose----"
"It is impossible!" De Violaine interrupted, his voice at war with his features. For, though there seemed to be a harshness in the former, there were tears in the latter. And Bevill, hearing the harshness even as he saw the tears, was amazed--staggered, too, as he showed while repeating the word "Impossible."
"Ay. They are not here. Not in Liége. They have left--evaded--the city."
"Left! Gone!"
"Yes. Doubtless you of all others best know whither."
"I know nothing."
"You knew where they would go when you sought to accompany them. You can have little doubt where they are gone without you."
To say now that he did not know, that he could not conceive which way those two women had for certain directed their steps would, Bevill recognised, be but to add one more equivocation, one more evasion of the absolute truth, to those he had been obliged to perpetrate in his desire to escape with Sylvia from Liége. But now--and if he could welcome the perilous position in which he stood he was almost brought to do so by De Violaine's last utterance--equivocations, evasions, were no longer necessary. Henceforth, since he had failed and Sylvia had escaped from Liége, and also was undoubtedly either with the English or some portion of the Allies, he need never again utter one word that was not absolutely a true one. He had failed in that which he had undertaken, yet, he thanked God, that failure mattered not. Out of it had at least come the escape of her he loved.
He stood, therefore, before De Violaine neither asserting nor denying the last words of the other; while that other, observing the calm frankness of his manner, thought that, should there be any future before this man, should he and the woman he loved ever come by any chance together, how proud, how happy in her possession of him, should that woman be.