“You needn’t hurry,” Sefton answered coolly. “It isn’t six o’clock; and you don’t come on the stage till half-past eight. You’d better sit down and take things easily. You don’t look much like going into the street, with that crying face. You’d better get over your scene with your lover before you go out of doors.”
“I have no lover,” Lisa answered indignantly, tossing up her head.
In Sefton’s eyes she had never looked lovelier than at that moment; every feature instinct with passion; red lips and delicate nostrils faintly quivering; a rich carmine flushing the pale olive of her cheeks; the great dark eyes brightened by tears; the haughty pose of the head giving something of aristocracy to that uncultured beauty. He loved her with a passion which every fresh indication of her cold indifference had stimulated to increasing warmth. He loved her first because she was lovely and fascinating in her childish simplicity. He loved her next and best because she, who by every common rule of life should have been so easily won, had proved invincible. The greatest princess in the land—the woman most hedged round by conventionalities—could not have held herself more aloof than Lisa had done, even while condescending to accept his friendship. She had held herself aloof; and she had shown him that she was not afraid of him.
He saw her now under a new aspect, saw her deeply moved, with all the potentialities of tragedy in those tremulous lips and shining eyes. He saw now in all its reality the passion which informed her acting, and gave pathetic reality to all that there was of sentiment in her rôle. He saw the moving spring which had made it so easy for her to represent in all its touching details the passion of hopeless love.
“You have no lover? You are an audacious woman to make that assertion to me when I have seen you in his company, after an interval of years, and when each time I saw you, your face has been a declaration of love. I met the man on your staircase just now; and I can read the history of his visit in your eyes. Do you mean to tell me that he is anything less than your lover?”
“I mean to tell you nothing. Che diavolo! What are you to me that you should call me to account? Signor Zinco said I was very foolish to let you come here. It was only because my aunt and the boy liked you that I let you come. And you took us on the river, which was pleasant. One must have some one.”
“You will have me no more until we understand each other,” cried Sefton, furiously. “Voglio finirla. I will not be fooled. I will not be duped. I will not be your abject slave as I have been, going night after night to feast upon your beauty, to drink the music of your voice, giving you my whole mind and heart, and getting nothing for my pains, not even the assurance that you are growing fonder of me, that love will come in good time. Do you think I am the man to endure that sort of torture for ever?”
“I do not think at all about you. Voglio finirla, io! I have made up my mind that it will be better for you not to come here any more. We shall miss you and your clever talk, and the days on the river—but we can live without you—and as for love, that is over and done with. I shall never love anybody but Paolo and la Zia. I have cared for two people in this world—and my love ended badly with both. The one who loved me died. The one I loved the most never loved me. There, you have my confession without questioning. Are you satisfied now?”
“Not quite. The man you love is the man who left you just now—Paolo’s father?”
He came nearer to her as he asked this daring question; the question he had been longing to ask from the beginning of things. He took hold of her arm almost roughly, and drew her towards him, scrutinizing her face, and trying to read her secret in her eyes.