"My memory serves me perfectly," he answers coolly; "it was to have been our wedding-day."
Was to have been. As he speaks the words coldly, almost cruelly, as she looks in his face, the last trace of color leaves her own. The hot fire dies out of her eyes, an awful terror comes in its place. With all her heart, all her strength, she loves the man she so bitterly reproaches. It seems to her she can look back upon no time in which her love for him is not.
And now, it was to have been!
She turns so ghastly that he springs to his feet in alarm.
"Good Heaven, Inez! you're not going to faint, are you? Don't! Here, take my chair, and for pity's sake don't look like that. I'm a wretch, a brute—what was it I said? Do sit down."
He has taken her in his arms. In the days that are gone he has been very fond, and a little afraid of his gipsy cousin. He is afraid still—horribly afraid, if the truth must be told, now that his momentary anger is gone.
All the scorn, all the defiance has died out of her voice when she speaks again. The great, solemn eyes transfix him with a look he cannot meet.
"Was to have been," she repeats, in a sort of whisper; "was to have been. Victor, does that mean it never is to be?"
He turns away, shame, remorse, fear in his averted face. He holds the back of the chair with one hand, she clings to the other as though it held her last hope in life.
"Take time," she says, in the same slow, whispering way. "I can wait. I have waited so long, what does a few minutes more matter now? But think well before you speak—there is more at stake than you know of. My whole future life hangs on your words. A woman's life. Have you ever thought what that implies? 'Was to have been,' you said. Does that mean it never is to be?"