"But if you have not told him——Well, what I have to say is my excuse. If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste in saying it."
He moved still nearer.
"I have told him," she said.
"No."
"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes, her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.
"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied. I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening, and the absence from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now—now, ach, I know I love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my punishment—for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still be hopeless."
She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the cold.
"Hopeless?" she repeated.
"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."
She remembered her teaching in the convent school.