But what proof could be given of the truth of such vows? The young man had himself deceived and been deceived too often for distrust not to be the most natural of his feelings. He had provoked this odious discussion concerning their place of meeting only for the purpose of studying in Helen's replies the traces left by the amorous experiences through which she had passed, and mere curiosity led him to dwell upon a subject which at that moment was stifling the young woman with shame. The scruples that she displayed about not yielding to him in her own house seemed to him a calculation due to voluptuousness; those about not yielding to him at his house, a calculation due to prudence. When she refused to go to the rooms of a friend: "She is afraid of my confiding in some one," he said to himself, "but what does she want?"
"Suppose I furnished a little suite of rooms?" he said.
She shook her head, though this had been her secret dream, but she was afraid that he would see in her acceptance nothing but a desire to gain time, and then—the necessity, if their meetings occurred always in the same place, of enduring the notice of the people of the house, the thought of being the veiled lady whose arrival is watched! Nevertheless, although such a contrivance also involved a question of outlay which horrified her, she would have consented to it had she not had another feeling, the only one which, shaking her head with its rising fever, she uttered aloud.
"Do not misjudge me, Armand; rather understand me. I should like to be yours in a place of which nothing would remain afterwards. What would become of the rooms you furnished for me if ever you ceased to love me? Why, I cannot endure the thought of it, even now. Do not wrong me, dear; only understand me."
Thus did she speak, laying bare the profoundly romantic side of her nature, as also her heart's secret wound. Although she did not account fully to herself for Armand's character—a character frightful in aridity beneath loving externals, for in this man there was an absolute divorce between imagination and heart—she perceived only too clearly that he was inclined to misinterpret the slightest indications. She saw that distrust was springing up in him with an almost unhealthy suddenness. She had been quite aware that he suspected her, but she had believed that this doubt proceeded solely from her refusals to belong to him.
It was on this account that she was consenting to give him this last proof. "He will doubt no longer," she thought to herself, and the mere idea of this warmed her whole heart. If only he did not give a guilty construction to her replies? She rose to go to him, and leaning over the back of his arm-chair, encircled his forehead with her hands.
"Ah!" she said with a sigh, "if I could know what is going on in here. It is such a little space, and it is in this little space that all my happiness and my misfortune are contained."
"If you were able to read in it," the young man replied, "you would see only your own image."
"I shall read in it to-morrow," she said subtly.
"To-morrow," he returned with a smile; "but what about the place of our meeting? There is nothing left but furnished rooms or a hotel."