‘You seem younger. Well, that’s so much the better. Twenty sounds strong and firm. How old do you think I am?’
‘I have never thought of considering.’ He innocently turned to scrutinize her face. She winced a little. But the instinct was premature. Time had taken no liberties with her features as yet; nor had trouble very roughly handled her.
‘I will tell you,’ she replied, speaking almost with physical pain, yet as if determination should carry her through. ‘I am eight-and-twenty—nearly—I mean a little more, a few months more. Am I not a fearful deal older than you?’
‘At first it seems a great deal,’ he answered, musing. ‘But it doesn’t seem much when one gets used to it.’
‘Nonsense!’ she exclaimed. ‘It is a good deal.’
‘Very well, then, sweetest Lady Constantine, let it be,’ he said gently.
‘You should not let it be! A polite man would have flatly contradicted me. . . . O I am ashamed of this!’ she added a moment after, with a subdued, sad look upon the ground. ‘I am speaking by the card of the outer world, which I have left behind utterly; no such lip service is known in your sphere. I care nothing for those things, really; but that which is called the Eve in us will out sometimes. Well, we will forget that now, as we must, at no very distant date, forget all the rest of this.’
He walked beside her thoughtfully awhile, with his eyes also bent on the road. ‘Why must we forget it all?’ he inquired.
‘It is only an interlude.’
‘An interlude! It is no interlude to me. O how can you talk so lightly of this, Lady Constantine? And yet, if I were to go away from here, I might, perhaps, soon reduce it to an interlude! Yes,’ he resumed impulsively, ‘I will go away. Love dies, and it is just as well to strangle it in its birth; it can only die once! I’ll go.’