"Shall we look at your prison?" he asked.
"No!" protested the girl.
"It is a worse prison you are going to," he commented dryly, "far worse. Why don't you show the same fear for the future that you show for the harmless memory of the past? I saved you from one. Ah, Nancy, why won't you let me save you from the other?"
She looked past him at the gods on their lotus blossoms, and made no answer. Ronald watched her, noted the masses of dark hair piled low round her forehead, the tranced stare of her eyes, the slow curve of her throat, arms half bare, hands far too smooth and supple for the rough-grained table on which they were stretched.
"You were not meant for prison, Nancy," he said gently.
But the appeal of his words was frustrated by the entrance of the monk. Every moment the girl expected his yellow-toothed confederate to appear.
"I can't talk here," she said. "This place hurts me. It chokes me."
The man, however, was unwilling to leave the cobwebbed hall. An unbelievable superstition held him here because this had been the place they had named for their pilgrimage. He felt the influence of the dusky temple fighting his battle in Nancy's heart.
"Don't you see?" he cried in a low voice. "Doesn't this place show you what I mean? Nancy, Nancy, you say it hurts you, chokes you. What chokes you? Just the memory of a danger long ago. What is that compared with the marriage you are facing? A laugh and a smile. If you can't bear to think in this mouldy, decaying place because the walls stifle you with torturing thoughts, what are you going to do when you have no friend, no protection, when life really begins to choke and to hurt—when they lock you into a red chair and send you away to be the slave of strangers?"
"I will stop doing. I will stop thinking," answered Nancy simply, as though deed and thought could be laid away like garments too rich for the everyday wear of life.