“Have you fled to the shadows to avoid us all?” he demanded, 322 and then as he slipped her hand through his arm and looked down in her face, he asked, more tenderly, “or may I think you only left the crowd to think over my audacity.”
She gave him one fleeting, upward glance, half inviting, half reproving––it would help concentrate his attention until the man in the shadows was beyond all danger of discovery.
“You make use of every pretext to avoid me,” he continued, “but it won’t serve you; no matter what cool things you say now, I can only hear through your words the meaning of those Fontainbleau days, and that one day in Paris when you loved me and dared to say it. Judithe, give me my answer. I thought I could wait until tomorrow, but I can’t; you must tell me tonight; you must!”
“Must?” She drew away from him and leaned against a tall garden vase overrun with clustering vines. They were in the full blaze of light from the windows; she felt safer there where they were likely to be interrupted every minute; the man surely dared not be wildly sentimental in full view of the crowd––which conclusion showed that she was not yet fully aware of what Kenneth McVeigh would dare do where a woman––or the woman was in question.
“An hour ago you said: ‘Will you?’ Now it is: ‘You must!’” she said, with a fine little smile. “How quick you are to assume the tone of master, Monsieur.”
“If you said slave, the picture would have been more complete,” he answered. “I will obey you in all things except when you tell me to leave you;” he had possessed himself of her hand, under cover of the vines; “it’s no use, Judithe, you belong to me. I can’t let you go from me again; I won’t!”
All of pleading was in his voice and eyes. Moved by some sudden impulse not entirely guileless, she looked full at him and let her hand remain in his.
“Well, since you really cannot,” she murmured.
“Judithe! You mean it?” and in an instant both his hands were clasping hers. “You are not coquetting with me this time? Judithe!”