“Quite. I mean, I will not detain you longer.”
“One would think, Countess,” he said quietly, watching her with probing eyes, “that you were glad, rather than sorry, to hear the bad news.”
“You can hardly expect me to discuss with you my feelings on the subject,” she returned, with a significant move towards the bell.
He made a swift step forward and intercepted her. “Alexia—Countess,” he said, with a note of passion in his voice, “is this my welcome back to life?”
“What other,” she asked, coldly as ever, and with a self-possession that hid her knowledge of how critical the interview must be, “could you expect from me?”
“I had hoped,” he answered simply, “for one of a very different kind.” Then his manner changed abruptly with a bitter exclamation. “Welcome! As though I had not atoned by years of hopeless agony for all the sins of my past! Alexia!” He tried to take her hand: she drew it away with a movement of avoidance.
“No,” she said peremptorily; “I forbid you to speak to me like that.”
He bowed his head in submission and so hid the baulked devil that shot a blaze into his eyes. “I come back to life and the world to find you as beautiful, as cold, as cruel as ever,” he murmured, with schooled humility.
“I cannot listen to you any longer,” Alexia said. “Please go.”
He was facing her now with a look of fight in his eyes. “My message to you,” he protested with quiet insistence, “was two-fold. I warn you, for your own sake and Geoffrey Herriard’s, not to dismiss me till you have heard the second part.”