"Oh!"
It was strange how the woman's countenance had darkened; it did not look grieved, but angry. At that instant, if her face had worn a different look, Lawrence's heart might have suddenly melted and some things have happened differently. But no, he told himself afterward, how could she change herself? What was to be would be. The old fatalistic saying recurred to him again and again. But what was he, that he should blame any one for anything?
"Prudence," he said. He put out his thin, burning hand and took hers; but in a moment she withdrew it. She stood before him, her graceful, erect figure in a blaze of sunshine that poured in through the window behind her.
Lawrence wondered that her touch could give him no thrill now; his blood ran coldly beneath her kiss. Was he beginning to know her? or was it that he had known her when she had so enthralled him?
These questions went through his mind so persistently that he was confused.
"I have been a puppet in your hands," he said. He added, with an inexplicable smile, "But then, there was Mark Antony."
He leaned wearily back in his chair. Prudence went to her own chair and sat down in it. The crow hopped round to her knee; he sat there looking at her, first with one eye and then with the other. She thought it was curious that she should recall, just at this moment, that night she had spent in the Boston hotel after the Vireo had been run down, the night before she had been married. She and the crow had been together then, and she had thought of killing him. It seemed to her that the bird had called her a liar—a liar. She tried to throw off this remembrance.
She looked at the man sitting so wearily opposite her. So he believed he had never loved her? Well, she still believed that she had loved him. It was galling that he should have told her that. He ought to have known better than to say such a thing. So she had been a kind of Cleopatra to him? Well, he was not a Mark Antony to be held by love; but he hadn't loved, he said. She also was becoming confused. She put her cold fingers up to her temples and pressed them there for an instant.
"Never shall amorous Antony
Kiss kingdoms out for you."