After an instant’s pause, she bowed her head.
“Do you think,” he cried, “it is with a light heart that I turn my back upon the life of earth, and all it might have meant for you and me—for you and me, Lucilla?”
“Yes,” the woman whispered, “Basil, for you and me.”
He reached down his hands, and she rose, letting him help her, and stood beside him.
“Rather than live without you,” he told her, “I am glad to die with you; but, oh, what a wretched gladness compared with that of living with you, and loving you! I wonder if you have guessed what it has meant to me, ever since we met at Dehra Dun, to see you as another man’s wife? It has been hell—hell!”
“Yes,” she said, “I know, Basil. I have known from the beginning.”
“Oh, what do I care,” he cried passionately, “for a bloodless, shadowy life—life in the abstract, with all the senses extinct? Better eternal sleep!”
“Oh, Basil,” the woman said, “you are going back on your own wisdom. Shall we not there—where we are going—”
“Wisdom!” he exclaimed with hot contempt. “What has wisdom to say to love, thwarted and unfulfilled? You were right when you said that it is a mockery to speak of love without hands to clasp, without lips to kiss.”
“I, too,” the woman owned, “regret—perhaps as much as you—that things were—as they were. But not even your love—”