“I’ll be content to have you as my wife—at any price,” he said stubbornly. “Jean”—a sudden urgency in his tones—“try to believe I hate all this as much as you do. When you’re my wife, I’ll spend my life in teaching you to forget it—in—wiping the very memory of to-day out of your mind.”
“I shall never forgot it,” she said slowly. Then, bitterly: “I wonder why you even offer me a choice—when you know; that it is really no choice.”
“Why? Because I swore to you that you should give me what I want—that I wouldn’t take even a kiss from you again by force. But”—unevenly—“I didn’t know what it meant—the waiting!”
Outside, the mist had thickened into fog, curtaining the windows. The light had dimmed to a queer, glimmering dusk, changing the values of things, and out of the shifting shadows her white face, with its scarlet line of scornful mouth, gleamed at him—elusive, tantalising as a flower that sways out of reach. In the uncertain half-light which struggled in through the dulled window-panes there was something provocative, maddening—a kind of etherealised lure of the senses in the wavering, shadowed loveliness of her. The man’s pulses leaped; something within him slipped its leash.
“Kiss me!” he demanded hoarsely. “Don’t keep me waiting any longer. Give me your lips... now... now...”
She sprang aside from him, warding him off. Her eyes stormed at him out of her white face.
“You promised!” she cried, her voice sharp with fear. “You promised!”
The tension of the next moment strained her nerves to breaking-point.
Then he fell back. Slowly his arms dropped to his sides without touching her, his hands clenching with the effort that it cost him.
“You’re right,” he said, breathing quickly. “I promised. I’ll keep my promise.” Then, vehemently: “Jean, why won’t you let me take you home? I could put the car right in ten minutes. Come home!”