“There is nothing further from my thoughts than to forsake you; but if you make scenes of this kind I can never trust myself to come here again,” he answered sternly.
“You will never come here again!” she cried, looking at him with wild eyes. “Then I will not live without you; I cannot, I will not.”
The window stood open with its balcony and flowers, and the sunlit river, and the sunlit park and dim blue horizon of house-tops and chimneys stretching away to the hills of Sydenham. The girl looked at him for a moment, clenched her teeth, clenched her hands, and made a rush for the balcony. Happily he was quick enough and strong enough to stop her with one outstretched arm. He took her by the shoulder, savagely almost, with something of the brutal roughness of her old lover it might be, but with no love. Beautiful as she was in her passionate self-abandonment, he felt nothing for her in that moment but an angry contempt, which he was at little pains to conceal.
The revulsion of feeling upon that wild impulse towards self-destruction came quickly enough. The tears rolled down her flushed cheeks, she sank into the chair towards which Vansittart led her, and sat, helpless and unresisting, with her hands hanging loose across the arms of the chair, her head drooping on her breast, the picture of helpless grief.
He could but pity her, seeing her so childlike, so unreasoning, swayed by passion as a lily is bent by the wind. He shut the window, and bolted it, against any second outbreak; and then he seated himself at Lisa’s side and took one of those listless hands in his.
“Let us be reasonable, Si’ora,” he said, “and let us be good friends always. If I were not in love with a young English lady whom I hope very shortly to make my wife I might have fallen in love with you.”
She gave a melancholy smile, and then a deep sigh.
“No, no, impossible! You would never have cared. I am too low—the mother of Paolo—only fit to be your servant.”
“Love pardons much, Lisa; and if my heart had not been given to another your beauty and your generous nature might have won me. Only my heart was gone before that night at Covent Garden. It belonged for ever and for ever to my dear English love.”
“Your English love! I should like to see her”—with a moody look. “Is she handsome, much handsomer than I?”