"Do you believe me?" she asks, eagerly, her little fingers tightening their clasp upon his coat-sleeve.
Still he is dumb.
"Do you?" she repeats, excitedly, the quick breath passing to and fro pantingly across the threshold of her crimson lips.
"Why do you insist on making me uncivil?" he says, with a sarcastic smile. "I do not believe you. I dare say you fancy you are telling truth; but if another man were to come on the scene with a few thousands a-year more, and a higher position in the social scale, you would enact the same part over again. Women must be true to their instincts. Those who are bent on rising must kick down the ladder by which they have climbed: it is an irreversible law."
"You are mistaken," she says, eagerly. "I have no desire to climb; if I came here with any silly, childish idea that rich people were happier than poor ones, I have been quite disillusioned. Bob" (how oddly the little unromantic name comes in among her heroics!)—"Bob is a happier man than you are, though he is only a lieutenant in a foot regiment, and has next to nothing to live upon."
"I have no doubt that Bob" (with a little sneering emphasis on the monosyllable) "is in all respects a very superior person to me," says St. John, with a bitter pale smile, like a gleam of wrathful sunlight on a day of east wind and clouds and driving sleet.
"I quite agree with you," she answers eagerly, her great eyes flashing angry, like unwonted meteors that blaze fitful in the winter sky, "and I wish to Heaven I had never left him!"
Over Gerard's features a spasm, contracting and puckering them, passes ugly and painful; his hands clench themselves in the mightiness of his effort to govern his smitten soul. "That is easily remedied," he answers, after a little pause, in a clear cold voice. "Why should not you go back to him as you came? There is no reason why he should ever hear of this—this episode, this interlude, this farce."
"And you think that I am to be bandied about like a bale of goods!" she cries, scornfully, voice trembling and lip quivering with passion. "You are like the woman in the Judgment of Solomon, who said, 'Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it!' You love me! You never did!"
"Perhaps not," he answers, with slow difficulty; "perhaps what I loved was my ideal that I fancied I had found in you, and when I found I was mistaken, perhaps the love went too! My God, I wish it had!"