“Then I will never give you up,” she murmured.
Her beseeching arms were around his neck and he could no longer resist. In halting accents, that were sometimes angry, sometimes ashamed, he told her all she wished to know, and she listened, still clinging to him, but with her hair bound about her face so that he could not see its expression.
When he finished she drew a long sigh, and he found that she was crying.
“Well,” he said, “are we to be husband and wife, or must we separate?”
“We shall never separate, if it rests with me,” she said gently. “But why, oh, why did you dislike my mother?”
“I will make it up to the daughter,” he said, and vehemently. “Can you not see, Vivienne, that if things had not been as they were I would have been spared my worst anxiety?”
“I am so shocked at the wickedness of the world,” she said, “so shocked! I never dreamed of it when I was at school.”
“Yes,” he said gloomily, “it is a bad world.”
“But there is much goodness,” she went on with a sudden radiance of face; “and I am not one to say that the world becomes worse instead of better.”
His face brightened. “Yes, men and women do each other good as well as a frightful amount of evil.”