“I’ll leave him and come to you! We’ll go away together! You once said—d’you remember when I dined with you in an air-raid?—you said you’d rather a bomb hit the house and killed us both than see me married to any one else! I’m here... And I’m blind with misery, Eric. I want to be happy. I want to make you happy. No one need know... Or, if you like, you can let every one know. I’ve made my mistake, I’ll tell George, I’ll ask him to forgive me. He won’t want to keep me, when he knows I don’t love him. We can go away for a time—”
She was creeping inch by inch nearer to him, and Eric suddenly felt the touch of dry and burning fingers on his wrist.
“Stop this nonsense!,” he cried, shrinking back.
The grating harshness of tone sobered her a little. She did not try to touch him again, he could see her mentally preparing a retreat, an escape, a means of saving her face, if he finally repelled her; he could see, too, that she did not mean to be lightly repelled.
“You usedn’t to call my love ‘nonsense’ in old days,” she answered quietly.
“Things have changed.”
“Your love has changed.”
“My love is dead.”
“And you used to say that I must marry you, because I’d spoiled all other women for you.”
Eric nodded slowly. It was so characteristic of her to remember and quote, even at the most critical moment of her life, a dog’s-eared phrase of extravagant adulation.