He knocked the ashes out of his pipe. ‘Yes, ma petite, I’ve got your heart in my safe keeping; and what’s more, I don’t mean to let you have it back at any price. The pretty toy is not for sale.’
His audacity took her breath away, yet it may be that she did not like him less on that account. Certainly Dick’s love-making was of a kind of which she had had no previous experience.
‘You have got me here by a mean and shabby subterfuge,’ she cried. ‘You have made a prisoner of me, and now you think you can say what you like to me.’
‘That’s so,’ he answered equably. ‘Now that I’ve got you here, I mean to say my say. Idiot if I didn’t!’
Bella had never felt so helpless in her life. This man seemed to turn all her weapons against herself. And she was afraid even to stamp her foot!
Richard proceeded to fill his pipe. ‘Don’t you think, carissima, that we have had enough of fencing, you and I?’ he asked as he struck a match. ‘Don’t you think we had better put the foils aside for the present and talk a little quiet common-sense?’ His voice had softened strangely. All his flippancy seemed to have vanished in a moment.
She did not answer. Her eyes were gazing straight over his shoulder at the great solemn hills in the background—not that she saw them in reality. He let his match burn itself out, and laid down his unlighted pipe. Then he leaned forward and took one of her hands in his strong brown palms. His touch thrilled her. All power of resistance seemed taken from her. Her bosom rose and fell more quickly, a tender radiance suffused her eyes, the roses in her cheeks grew larger, and their tints deepened. Love’s sorcery was upon her. She had drunk of the potion, and was lost. Never again could she be quite the same as she had been.
What was the ‘quiet common-sense’ he was going to talk? she wondered. She had her doubts already as to the accuracy of his definition.
‘There comes a time in the lives of most of us,’ he began with unwonted seriousness and still holding one of her hands, ‘when we are confronted by two diverging paths, and are called upon to make our choice between them. At such a crisis you, my dearest, have now arrived. Before you lie two widely diverging paths, one only of which you can take, and from which there can be no return. With one of these paths you are already familiar; you have trodden it for two years; you know whither it leads, or fancy that you know. If you believe that you will find your happiness at the end of it, for heaven’s sake, keep to it still! But if you don’t so believe—why, then, the other path is open to you.’
He paused. She withdrew her hand. He at once began to feel for his match-box. She regretted that she had not allowed him to retain her fingers.