“Whether we had any intention of fulfilling it?”
“Ditto!”
“Whether it was essential to our happiness?”
“Essential to our happiness,” repeats she, as if it were a dictation lesson.
“He said that we were all that he had left in the world.”
Lavinia nods, speech seeming difficult. Is Rupert going to recapitulate, in his father’s unsparing Saxon, the reason for that father’s anxiety to see them wed? She waits in rosy dread. It is a moment or two before relief comes.
“He ended by adjuring me not to marry you in order to please him. I think I was able to reassure him as to that not being my primary inducement.”
They know each other far too well for her not to be instantly aware of an alteration in his voice—not to have an instant’s flashed certainty that the playmate, the comrade, the brother-cousin, is gone, and that the lover stands full-fledged in their stead before her. Whether the conviction causes her pain or pleasure, she could not tell you. She only feels as she has done in the morning, but a thousandfold more so, that the situation is overpoweringly odd.
“Well!” she says slowly, afraid to look away from him, lest she should never again be able to lift her stupidly rebellious eyes to his.
“I suppose it was bound to come, some time or other?”