“I loved you,” said William passionately. “I loved you, I asked you to consider me, and—you do this!”
“You loved me!” she repeated the words slowly. “You—loved—me!”
She let the accent fall on the past tense, but he was deaf to the implied appeal.
“Fanchon, you knew what they’d think of it here—you must have known. Why did you do it?” he cried impatiently. “It’s like your cigarette in the streets—you like to do these things!”
“Mais oui, I like to do them!” she replied softly. She laughed lightly. “I’m naughty, William, but”—she leaned toward him again, looking at him with her fawn-like eyes—“I’m sorry!”
Her look, her voice, her very attitude expressed surrender, and the softness of her tone appeased him. He turned his head reluctantly and looked at her. The light was behind her, making a nimbus behind her lovely head, her soft, dark hair, and her white forehead, and the beauty of her eyes. Her dress, too, the dancer’s silky, shimmering, clinging robe, seemed to reveal just enough of her white neck and arms. She was a thing so young, so exquisite, and so subtly charming that he caught his breath. She looked as she had looked the first time he saw her, when he lost his heart and his head. Her dark eyes clung to his. “Et toi?” she murmured softly, exquisitely, her lips trembling a little.
Involuntarily he put out his hand and touched hers as it lay on the table, and the tenderness of that touch was a caress. For the moment he forgot his father and his own anger. She was bewitching, and she was his own! What did it matter if these narrow-minded provincials were shocked at her dancing?
Yet he was aware that while she accepted his caress, accepted his forgiveness, and gave him a soft and caressing smile, she was changed. Something had come between them—something so subtle, so immaterial, that he could not grasp it; but he felt ill at ease. He said nothing, he did not know what to say, he felt that the grievance was honestly his, and yet, in some mysterious, unfathomable way, she had put him in the wrong.
He laughed uneasily and began to move the glasses about awkwardly, jingling the ice in them like a child. He was glad, too, that the waiter returned at that moment, with the supper. He changed his order again and called for wine.
“I’m tired,” he explained to Fanchon. “I feel as if I needed it.”