He had thought her nearly as pale as it was possible for her to be when he had first come upon her. He now realizes how many degrees of colour she then had left to lose. While he speaks she has been mechanically pulling her thread through, and as he ceases, her lifted hand stops as if paralyzed, and remains holding her needle in the air.
It has come, then. For all her two days' bracing, is she ready for it?
"Now?"
The whisper in which this monosyllable is breathed is so stamped with a fear that borders on terror, that his one astonished thought is bow best to reassure her.
"Not if you do not feel inclined, of course—not unless you like. It can perfectly well be put off to another time. I can tell him—there will not be the least difficulty in making him understand—that you do not feel up to it this morning: that you would rather have more notice."
"But I would not," she says, standing up suddenly, and with trembling hands laying her work down upon the table, and beginning from dainty habit to pin it up in its protecting white cloth. "What good would more notice—a year's notice—do me?"
She turns away from him and fixes her unseeing eyes, glassy and dilated, upon a poplar tree that is hanging tasselled catkins out against the sky. Then once again she faces him, and he sees that there are cold beads of agony upon her forehead.
"Wish for me," she says huskily—"wish very hard for me, that I may get through it—that we may both get through it—alive!"
Then, motioning to him with her hand not to follow her, she walks quickly towards the hotel.
It is impossible to him to stay quiet. He wanders restlessly away, straying he knows not whither. The mimosas are out charmingly in the gardens, sending delicious whiffs of perfume from the soft yellow fluff of their flowers. The pinky almond-trees are out too, but not till long afterwards does he know it.