"Gratitude!" He shrugged his shoulders. "You owe me none; and even if you did, what use is gratitude to a man who asks for love?"
"I trust you; I rely upon you," she said. "It is—pleasant to me to know that you are near." A line of perplexity came between the dark fine eyebrows; the sweet colour in her face wavered and sank. "But—if you were to touch me—to take me in your arms—I——" She shivered.
"You need not say more!" If she was pale, Saxham's stern, square face was ashen. His eyes glowered and fell under hers, and a purple vein swelled in the middle of his broad white forehead. "I understand!"
"You do not understand quite yet." She moved away from the Mother's grave, saying to him with a slight beckoning gesture of the hand, "Please come!..."
Saxham followed her, hearing the harsh, jeering laughter of that other Saxham above the faint rustle of her dress. His covetous, despairing eyes dwelt on her and clung about her. Ah! the exquisite poise of the little head, with its red-brown waves and coils; the upright, slender elegance of shape, like a young palm-tree; the long, smooth, undulating step with which she moved between the graves, picking her way with sedulous, delicate care among the little crowding white-painted crosses; the atmosphere of girlish charm and womanly allurement that breathed from her and environed her!...
His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again its whispering at his ear.
"You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. Better to be unhappy in the sight and sound and touch of her, unpossessed, than to be desperate, lacking her. Accept her conditions with a mental reservation. Trust to Time, the healer, to bring change and forgetfulness. Or, break your promise to that dead man, and tell her—as he would have had you tell her, remember!—as he would have had you tell her!—that when he asked her hand in marriage, he was the wedded husband of the dancer, Lessie Lavigne!"
He knew where she was leading him—to Beauvayse's grave. The voice kept whispering, urging as they went. He saw and heard as a man sees and hears in a dream the pair of butterflies that hovered yet about the fresh flowers her hands had gathered and placed there. One jewel-winged, diamond-eyed insect rose languidly and wavered away as Lynette's light footsteps drew near. The other remained, poised upon the lip of a honeyed, waxen blossom, with closed, vertically-held wings and quivering antennæ, sucking its sweet juices as greedily as the dead man had drunk of the joy of life.
Now she was speaking:
"Dr. Saxham, I have brought you here because I have something to tell you that he"—her face quivered—"should have been told. When you spoke a little while ago of openness and candour—when you said that you would never mislead or deceive me for your own advantage, that I should know the worst of you together with the best—you held up before me, quite unknowingly, an example that showed me—that proved to me"—her voice wavered and broke—"how much I am your inferior in honesty and truth!"