“Yes, you have,” he said quickly. “This man has sworn to destroy you.”
“Then let me go.”
“Are you strong enough?”
“I’ve all the strength I need to escape from this [[190]]prison in which you keep me and never to see you again,” she said bitterly.
He shrugged his shoulders with an air of discouragement.
“Don’t say that,” he said. “I could not live without you. I have suffered too much during your absence. I would rather endure anything—anything rather than be separated from you. My whole life depends on your regard, on you.”
She drew herself up, trembling with indignation, and cried: “I forbid you to speak to me like that. You swore to me that I should never hear a word of that kind again—abominable words!”
She sank back in her chair, exhausted by the effort. He moved away from her and threw himself into an arm-chair, his head between his hands, his shoulders shaken by his sobs, like a vanquished man for whom existence is an intolerable burden.
After a long silence he began again in a dull voice: “We’re still worse enemies than we were before you went away. You have come back quite different. What did you do, Aurelie—not at Sainte-Marie—but during the first three weeks during which I was hunting for you like a mad-man, before I thought of the convent? That wretched fellow William—you did not love him that I know. Nevertheless, you followed him. Why? And what became of the two of you? What has become of him? I have an intuition that very [[191]]serious things happened. I see that you are worried to death. In your delirium you talked like one who had been flying without stopping; and you kept seeing blood-corpses.”
She shuddered. “No, no!” she cried. “It is not true. You misunderstood me.”