"Then what would you gain?" she said, coldly, and the unveiled cynicism in the words went home.
I flushed.
"The certainty," I answered, briefly. "This indefinite state of things is simply intolerable."
She was silent for a second; then she said violently, the scarlet flowing over her face up to her eyes—
"No! It would be impossible to maintain such relations as those after marriage, and you know it! That is quite out of the question!"
I merely shrugged my shoulders in silence.
"I am waiting for your answer, Lucia," I said, after a few moments.
"And if I cannot give you one?"
"Then I leave town to-morrow morning."
She gave a fleeting glance into my face, and then suddenly burst into a passion of convulsive sobs and tears—sobs that seemed to tear her breast asunder, and tears that started in a blinding torrent, drenching her eyelids and eyelashes and pale cheeks.