She put her arms round his neck, laying her cheek against his. "Mon ami, I love you!"
He held her in his arms as one holds a child, rocking her to and fro. "Voilà chérie!" he whispered. "After to-morrow I shall have you always, I shall never let you go again. My dream is coming true."
Arithelli listened with dry eyes and an aching heart. She was past crying, and her brain felt curiously reasonable and alert. She could not send him from her at once, yet with every passing second Death drew stealthily nearer and nearer. Time swept on relentless and inflexible.
"Perhaps you will be disappointed in me one of these days, find me depressing and full of moods. I've always been so lonely, you know, till I met you. Je suis une âme detachée."
"Never again while I'm alive! I think of you and with you. When you are happy I know it, and when you are miserable I know it too. Fatalité! Fatalité! believe that I don't want anything in return. I'll wait on you, work for you, lie, starve, steal, do anything. I only want to know you're there, to have the right to serve you, to feel you don't hate me. I couldn't go on living it I lost you. Since the first day I saw you at the Hippodrome you've haunted me. I led Don Juan down to the entrance to the ring. You don't remember? How should you? I've never forgotten! You smiled and thanked me. You looked so strange beside Estelle and those other women."
He was kneeling beside her, his lips pressed against the hollow of her arm, from which the loose red sleeve had slipped back to above the elbow. Under his passionate words Arithelli sat like a being entranced, unseeing, unhearing. The inscrutable eyes set in the rigid face gave her the likeness to some carven thing.
"Fatalité! Fatalité!"
The sound of his voice came to her as from a distance. She roused herself, and tried to smile. "Mon ami, I'm a little tired to-night, a little nervous; I was thinking about the letters! I shall feel so much safer when they're burnt."
"I'll go at once—just one moment. Arithelli, you do believe that I love you, and that I want nothing? See, I'll not even touch your hand if it doesn't please you."
The soft hand was laid gently on his. "But if it does please me, mon camarade—"