The mute sign of assent showed him also a flight of steps leading up from the terrace to the balcony. A moment, and he was by her side.
No ordinary greeting passed between them. Perhaps none could have conveyed what that long silent gaze did; seeming to go straight to the heart of each, full of memories that time had softened, but sad with the sadness that is in all deep human love.
“A strange meeting-place,” she said. “Yet why more strange than the mountains of the East, or the lonely plains of the Desert, the steppes of Russia, or the house-tops of Damascus?”
“You read my thoughts, as ever,” he said. “I must confess that it seemed strange to see you here, treading the narrow path of English conventionalism, after—after—”
“I know,” she said. “But life is full of the unexpected. You do not ask how these five years have been spent. The years that have changed the dreamy enthusiastic girl into a woman such as you see before you.”
“I do not ask,” he said, his voice vibrating beneath an emotion he could not conceal, “because it can be no pleasure to me to learn. Do you forget what I told you? Do you think that the memory of these five years is a pleasant one for me? Against my prayers, against my warnings, you chose your own life. Are you free—now?”
“No,” she said, in a strange stifled voice, “never that—never while I wear the shackles of humanity!” She sank suddenly down in a low seat, and buried her face in her hands. “Oh,” she cried, faintly, “if I could tell you—if I only dared; but I cannot! My bondage is deeper—my chains are heavier. Sometimes I think those years were only a dream—a horrible, frightful dream—but then, again, I know they were not.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, his voice sharp with terror, for this shame and remorse that convulsed her, and made her one with the common weakness of her common womanhood, was something altogether different to the supremacy she had always shown in her proud girlhood.
“I cannot tell you,” she said, “I dare not.”
“Do you forget,” he said, severely, “that if I wish to know, I shall learn it?”