"You look unusually ill," she said.
"I am ill," he replied. "So ill that I should be almost glad to die."
Lucy paused. Somehow she never liked these semi-explanations. They invariably imbued her with a sense of self-reproach, an idea that she was acting harshly.
"Do you mean ill because of our estrangement?"
"Yes, for one thing. That makes all other trouble so much worse for me that at times I find it rather difficult to put up with."
Lucy played with her book. She wished she knew where her true duty lay. Oh how gladly, but for that dreadful wrong ever being enacted upon herself, would she fall upon his arm and whisper out her beseeching prayer: "Take me to you again, Karl!"
"Should the estranged terms we are living on, end in a total and visible separation, you will have the satisfaction of remembering in your after life, Lucy, that you have behaved cruelly to me. I repeat it: cruelly."
"I do not wish to separate," murmured Lucy.
"The time may soon come when you will be called upon to decide, one way or the other; when there will be nothing left to wait for; when all will be known to the world as it is known to us."
"I cannot understand you," said Lucy.