‘You do not stand still,’ she answered languidly, ‘you walk to and fro like a wounded panther in a cage. I have in no way betrayed you, and I am not jesting at all. I am saying the very simplest truth. You have asked me to do a momentous and irrevocable thing; and I have answered you truthfully that I should not shrink from it if I were convinced that I should never regret it. But I am not convinced——’
‘If you loved me you would be so!’ he said in a voice which was choked and almost inaudible.
‘Ah!—if!’ said Nadine Napraxine with a smile and a little sigh. ‘The whole secret lies in that one conjunction!’
His teeth clenched as he heard her as if in the intolerable pain of some mortal wound.
‘Besides, besides,’ she murmured, half to herself and half to him, ‘my dear Othmar, you are charming. You are like no one else; you please me; I confess that you please me, but you could not ensure me against my own unfortunate capacity for very soon tiring of everybody, and,—I have a conviction that in three months’ time I should be tired of you!’
A strong shudder passed over him from head to foot, as the words struck him with a greater shock than the blow of a dagger in his side would have given. He realised the bottomless gulf which separated him from the woman he adored,—the chasm of her own absolute indifference.
He, in his exaltation, was ready to give up all his future and fling away all his honour for her sake, and would have asked nothing more of earth and heaven than to have passed life and eternity at her feet; and she, swayed momentarily towards him by a faint impulse of the senses and the sensibilities, yet could draw back and calmly look outward into that vision of the possible future, which dazzled him as the mirage blinds and mocks the desert-pilgrim dying of thirst; she, with chill prescience could foresee the time when his presence would become to her a weariness, a chain, a yoke-fellow tiresome and dull!
She looked at him with a momentary compassion.
‘Dear Othmar, I am quite sure you have meant all you said,’ she murmured softly. ‘But, believe me, it would not do; it would not do for you and me, if it might for some people. I am not in the least shocked. I think your idea quite beautiful, like a poem; but I am certain it would never suit myself. I tire of everything so quickly, and then you know I am not in love with you. One wants to be so much in love to do that sort of thing, we should bore one another so infinitely after the first week. Yes, I am sure we should, though I know you are quite sincere in saying you would like it.’
Then, still with that demure, satisfied, amused smile, she turned away and lifted up the Moorish chocolate pot and poured out a little chocolate into her cup.