“I hate the thought of your fear,” he said in a lower voice; “it seems to increase my responsibility.”
Alexia smiled. “No, no, my friend,” she protested, “you must not think that. You, at least, cannot fail; your victory is already gained.”
“Not yet,” he replied deprecatingly; “still, I am confident that it will be.”
A sudden thought came to him; the conviction that if he were to put his fate to the touch it should be now; that to wait would be the timid, unchivalrous trick of an opportunist, and as he realized that the moment had come he stood dismayed. He glanced at the Countess, with a strange diffidence, for in his dealings with men and women confidence had become almost as second nature. The constrained silence that had come upon them seemed to prick him on; each second it lasted made the urgency cumulative. And yet words failed him. What could he say to her? How could he say it? His eyes rested on the graceful lines of her figure, the exquisite colouring and contour of her head. She was not a girl, but a woman of matured sensibilities for sympathy and love; the one woman he had met whom he longed to ask to share his life, the one woman in whose company he would be more content to face trouble than to pass a cloudless existence with any other. Yet how could he but hesitate? She was above him in rank; there was something royal in the very turn of her head, in the subtle splendour that seemed to exhale from her presence. True he was somebody now in the world; he had made his name both at the Bar and in the House. Then, with the encouraging thought, the spectre of his deceit rose up and stood between him and his love, till he wished she were guilty that they might meet on more equal terms. Still, that present one was the moment to be seized. That thought was insistent; it was under the shadow of this sharp disappointment that he must risk the question.
As he stood hesitating and tongue-tied, Alexia looked up, as it were with a glance of enquiry as to the reason of the silence. It was a provocative lifting of the deep grey eyes, and it drew him into speech as though moved by an enchanter’s touch outside the pale of calculation.
“Countess,” he said, “I wish I might, without offence, ask for the crown of my victory.”
She seemed to shrink a little from him, as she replied in a low voice, yet steadily, “The victory is not yet won; the crown is of doubtful glory.”
His tongue was loosened now. “Never to me,” he declared with passion. “Countess, it is all that I covet in this world; it can never be anything less to me than pure gold. Ah, if I might ever hope to wear it!”
But she made no responsive sign. “It is not time to speak of that,” she said, in a voice in which the feeling was so repressed that it seemed cold.
“If,” he rejoined, in a like tone, “it may ever be, surely this is the time.”