“What is it?” she asked uncertainly. “I would do a great deal to please you, Beppo, if only—if only”—her voice faltered—“if only you would be reasonable.”
He was looking at her now intently, almost as if he were trying to hypnotise her, with those strange, brilliant blue eyes of his.
“The favour I ask,” he said at last, and in a very low voice, “I ask, Lily, as a man prays for a saint’s intercession—on my knees. Do not be offended—do not be what you in England called ‘shocked.’ It is not a very great thing that I ask of you—yet to me it will be the greatest thing in the world. It is a thing which many a woman is quite willing to give—a friend.”
He stopped, and Lily, looking at him puzzled, asked hesitatingly: “What is it, Beppo? You know I would do anything in reason to please you.”
“All I ask for,” he said at last, “is the privilege——”
“Yes?” said Lily. “What privilege, Beppo?”
He did not answer at once, and when at last he spoke, his voice had dropped almost to a whisper.
“The privilege of taking you in my arms and kissing you just once, Lily! That is all I ask. Is it not possible that at the contact of our lips your hesitation, your coldness, will melt? May I not teach you what a man’s love means to the woman he adores?”
As he ended his quick, rapt, low utterances of these, to Lily, extraordinary and unexpected words, he suddenly got up, pulled her to her feet, and threw his arms round her.
And then, in the little motor, there began a terrible, wordless struggle between the two. Lily was determined—absolutely determined—that he should not kiss her. Rather than that, she would wrench herself free and leap into the gulf to the edge of which they were now so perilously near.