“Nor I, my friend,” she was saying: “it is a subject that I am forbidden to think about.”
If she conveyed a command, he disobeyed it.
“Then,” he said, “I wish you’d think about it now.”
“I am forbidden to think about it,” she continued, “and I do not think about it because I shall not marry any one—at least not any one that—that I——”
Her voice dropped into silence. She turned from him to the sunset over the gray city.
Cartaret’s exaltation left him more suddenly than it had come.
“Any one that you care for?” he asked in a lowered tone.
Still facing the city, she bowed assent.
“But, in Heaven’s name, whom else should you marry except somebody that you care for?”
She did not answer.