“It is so!” she answered.
“You are alone in the world,—alone, alone, alone!” he repeated with a kind of fierce intensity. “Alone!—for I know that neither your father nor your mother recognise you. Am I right or wrong?”
Still smiling, she bent her head.
“Right, of course!” she murmured, with delicate irony. “How could you be wrong!”
“Your own familiar friend will have none of you,” he went on, with almost angry emphasis. “To the world you once knew, you are dead! The man who was your lover—the man who, as you told me, spoilt your life and on whom you seek to be revenged——”
She lifted one hand with an interrupting gesture.
“That is finished,” she said. “I seek vengeance no longer. No man is worth it! Besides, I am avenged.”
She half rose from her reclining attitude, and he waited for her next word.
“I am avenged!” she went on, in thrilling accents—“And in a way that satisfies me. My lover that was,—never a true lover at best,—is my lover still—but with such limitations as are torture to a man whose only sense of love is—Desire! My beauty fills him with longing,—the thought of me ravages his soul and body—it occupies every thought and every dream!—and with this passion comes the consciousness of age. Age!—the great breakdown!—the end of all for him!—I have willed that he shall feel its numbing approach each day,—that he shall know the time is near when his step shall fail, his sight grow dim,—when the rush of youthful life shall pass him by and leave him desolate. Yes!—I am avenged!—he is ‘old enough now to realise that we are better apart!’”
Her eyes glowed like stars,—her whole face was radiant. Dimitrius gazed at her almost sternly.