“Health and youth!” he cried, ignoring her proffered hand, and throwing his own hands up in a gesture of repudiation. “And what do these signify in a situation such as yours? They only mean that you will prolong an existence which, for such a woman as you, seems worse than death. You ask me to leave you so? To say good-bye—”
“Yes, I beg it, I implore it, I insist upon it,” she interrupted him, feeling that her strength was almost gone. “You have said that you were willing to do me a service—then leave me.”
She sank back in her chair exhausted.
“My God! am I a brute?” he said. “Have I made you ill with my idiotic persistency? I will go. I will rid you of the distress and annoyance of my presence. But before I go, Bettina,” he said, with a sudden break in his voice, “I must and will satisfy my heart by one thing: I must, for the sake of my own soul’s peace, tell you this. I have never ceased to love you, and I never shall. I gave you up when I saw the renunciation to be inevitable, but I knew then, as I know now, that I can never put any other in your place. You were the love of my youth, and you will be the love of my old age, if my lonely life goes on till then. Don’t turn from me. Don’t hide your face like that. I ask nothing but this sacred right to speak. I know you never loved me. I know it is not in me—if, indeed, it be in any mortal man—to enter into the heaven of being loved by you. But, at least, you have been the vision in my life—the sacred manifestation of what girl and sweetheart and woman and wife might be—and for that I thank you. In the shadow of that beatific vision I shall walk henceforth, and believe me when I say that I shall walk there alone.”
Bettina, with her face buried in her hands, remained profoundly still. When he had waited a moment he began to fear that he had overtaxed her strength too far, and that she might have fainted.
Kneeling in front of her, he took her two wrists gently in his hands and tried to draw them away from her eyes. The strong resistance that she made to this gave evidence enough that she was conscious in every sentient nerve.
“Forgive me,” he said; “I am going—I have been wrong to force all this upon you—but it is the last time that we shall meet. Let me, I pray you, see your face once more before I turn away from it forever.”
The tense hands relaxed within his grasp, but he caught no more than a second’s glimpse of the beautiful face before it was hid against his shoulder.
At the same instant a low voice whispered in his ear:
“Don’t move until I speak to you.”