“But you must tell me that, Derry. I have gone a long way daringly. It is my privilege, my right. If you love me, you must expect it of me, because, as things are, I am forced to take the first step. But a woman must be sure that she is loved, and her lover alone can still her doubts.”
An impulse stronger than his own strength of will brought strange, wild words to his dry lips.
“Nancy,” he said, with the calm accents of despair, “I have never loved any woman but you, and, God willing, I never shall!”
“That is all that really matters,” she sighed, with a contented note in her voice that rang in his ears like a chord of sweet music heard from afar in the depths of a forest.
After that they sat in silence, she seemingly wrapped in dreams, and he wandering in a maze wherein impassable walls showed no gateway of escape; though the guarded path was alluring, and the air was heavy with the scent of flowers.
The cab stopped, and they alighted; for Nancy, demurely self-controlled, announced that she meant to take him for a stroll along the Cliff Walk. Power, deaf and blind to externals, would have accompanied her straightway; but she laughingly called him back from the clouds.
“Tell the cabman to wait,” she said, “and give him some money, or the poor fellow will think that we have come this long way from town purposely, and mean to go off without payment.”
He handed the driver a subsidy which caused the man to avow his willingness to wait till morning if necessary. Once away from the main road, and with no other company than the stars and the sea, Nancy took her escort’s arm, and kept step with him.
“Now,” she said, “I’m perversely disinclined to discuss personal affairs until we reach a certain rock at the foot of the Forty Steps. I mean to sit on that rock, and you will curl up on the shingle at my feet, and light a nice-smelling cigar, and listen while I explain the method in my madness of the last twenty-four hours. But I cannot arrange my thoughts in sequence till we are settled there comfortably. In the meantime, I’ll make you acquainted with my best friend, the Duchesse de Brasnes, whom you will meet some day in Paris, I hope, and then you will see for yourself some of her delightful eccentricities which I’ll recount to you now, and you will laugh quietly and say, ‘What an observant little person that Nancy is! Now, who’d have thought she could quiz and con a great lady of the Faubourg so accurately?’ But you’re not to misunderstand my joking; for the duchess is a dear, and I’m very fond of her.”
To this day Power has never recalled a single syllable of Nancy’s utterances concerning one of the leaders of Parisian society. All that he knew, or cared to know, was that the voice of his beloved was murmuring words which were curiously soothing to his tingling nerves. By this time he had cast scruples to the winds. His mind was armored with triple steel against any other consideration than that Nancy was by his side, that her hand rested confidently on his wrist, that he could feel her slender arm warm and soft near his heart.