“Is it done, dear?” she said gently.
Julian’s hand turned cold in hers, and his eyes fell away from her face.
“Not—not yet, Clemmie!” he faltered wretchedly. “I—I came to tell you—to tell you that——”
“That you are going to do it? That you are going to do it? My dear, my dear, you mean that? Oh, you mean that, don’t you?”
She had not raised her voice or changed her pose, but that touch upon his arm had become a close, convulsive grip, and even the clutch of the worn, blanched hand upon her cloak witnessed to the agony of supplication with which every nerve was strained and quivering. Her low voice thrilled and vibrated with it; her white face, to which his first words had brought a look of heart-sick disappointment, was an embodied prayer. He could not answer on the instant; it cut him like a lash; and she went on rapidly, her low, beseeching voice breaking and trembling with the intense feeling that flickered on her face like a light.
“Julian, for my sake, for your wife’s sake, dear! I love you so! I—I need you so! Don’t part us any longer! If it was for your good, if it was to make you happy, there’s nothing I would not face, and face cheerfully—ah, you know that, don’t you? But you’re doing wrong, and I think of it always, and it makes the loneliness so that I can’t bear it. Oh, I can’t bear it!”
She broke suddenly into low shuddering sobs and tears, and her head fell forward helplessly on to his breast, though she still kept her convulsive hold upon his arm. He put his other arm round her and drew her towards him, and as he did so he seemed to realise with a kind of double consciousness the course he would take and its utter contemptibility.
“Don’t, Clemmie dear! Don’t! don’t!” he said in a broken, uneven voice. “It’s all right, dear! I’m going to do it! I came to tell you so! It’s all right!”
“You’re going to—tell her?”
“I am, Clemence! I promise you I am! Only—only not for a week or two. There’s—there’s something I must wait for!”