She answered him almost mechanically, yet the ironical answer she delivered was true to her proud nature and the histrionic art which would not be denied expression even in the extremity to which she was reduced.
“That, sir, I can well believe.”
He considered her, wondering a little at that flash of spirit, from one in her condition. If anything it but served to increase his admiration. He sighed.
“Ah, my Sylvia, you shall forgive me the shifts to which my love has driven me, and this last shift of all with that roaring fool’s heroics and what they have led to. Endeavour not to think too harshly of me, child. Don’t blame me altogether. Blame that cos amoris, that very whetstone of love—your own incomparable loveliness and grace.”
She sat now stiffly upright, dissembling her fear behind a mask of indignant scorn that was sincere enough.
“Love!” she answered him in a sudden gust of that same scorn. “You call this violence love?”
He answered her with a throbbing vehemence of sincerity, a man pleading his own defence.
“Not the violence, but that which has moved me to it, that which would move me to tear down a world if it stood between you and me. I want you, Sylvia, more than I have ever wanted anything in life. It is because of the very fervency and sincerity of my passion that I have gone so clumsily to work, that in every attempt to lay my homage and devotion at your feet, I have but provoked your resentment. Yet, child, I swear to you that, if it lay in my power, if I were free to make you my Duchess, that is the place I should be offering to you now. I swear it by everything I hold sacred.”
She looked at him. There had been a humility in his bearing which, together with that vibrant sincerity in his voice, must surely have moved her at any other time. It moved her now, but only to a still greater scorn.