"Yes, Hew?" She looked round at him. He was staring at the ground as if something lay there he alone could see.
"I asked you to come out with me to-night, because—because"—and then in a voice so low, so hoarse, that she had to bend forward to catch the words—"I want to ask you, to implore you, Jane—to marry me at once."
"At once?" she repeated. "When do you mean by at once, Hew?" She also spoke in a still, low voice. They seemed to be hatching a conspiracy of which one, if not both, should feel ashamed.
And more than ever it seemed to Jane Oglander as if another man, a stranger, had taken possession of Hew Lingard's shape.
"I mean at once!" he answered harshly. "To-morrow—or the day after to-morrow. There's no necessity why we should ever go back to Rede Place! Why shouldn't we walk down to the station now, from here? We should be in London in an hour and a half. People have often done stranger things than that. We could send a message from the station to——" His voice wavered, his lips refused to form Mrs. Maule's name.
He thrust the thought of Athena violently from him; and with the muttered words, "Can't you understand? I love you—I want you, Jane——" he turned and gathered the woman sitting so stilly by his side into his arms.
She gave a stifled cry of surprise; and then, as he kissed her fiercely once, twice, and then again, there broke from her a low, bitter sigh—the sigh of a woman who feels herself debased by the caresses for which she has longed, of which she has been starved.
To Jane Oglander a kiss, so light, so willing a loan on the part of many women, was so intimate a gift as to be the forerunner of complete surrender. And to-night each of Hew Lingard's kisses was to her a profaned sacrament. Not so had they kissed on that day in London. Now his kisses told her, as no words could have done, of a divided allegiance.
She lay unresponsive, trembling in his arms, her eyes full of a wild, piteous questioning....
With a sudden sense of self-loathing and shame he released her from his arms.