"'For a laggard in love and a dastard in war—'
Oh, listen, listen, listen! Now you know! Now you know whose name I would not speak! Not in this place! Oh, oh!—Will and Nancy; after all, they are only pieces of myself! They are no more to me than—me! But he is all I am not and long for! He is life outside myself, to meet mine! He is my light and my air and my hope and my heart's desire! She knew it—she knew it! She had taken my youth and my faith and my kindness with the world, and killed them, and then she tried to kill him too!—Love him? O God!" cried Christina, "what must he think of me!" And she began to shake with weeping.
"That cub!" said Ten Euyck. "You love that cub!" And he took her in his arms; and covering her throat and hair with kisses, he held her off again, and tried to see into her face. "Do you?" he cried. "Do you? Do you?"
"Give me a handkerchief!" Christina snapped.
He was surprised into releasing her; and plucking forth her own scrap of lace, she wiped her nose with some deliberation. "I look hideous. I should like those lights out!"
He went about putting out light after light, till she said,
"Leave my lamp!"
She was standing beneath it, pensive and grave and now quite pale, with her back to the mantelshelf, her soft, fair arms stretched out along its length, and her head hanging. She might have been bound there, beneath the single lamp, like an olden criminal to a seacoast rock before the rising tide. The pale light floated over her as Ten Euyck came up and seemed to illumine her within a magic circle.
"My dear," Ten Euyck began, with a kind of solemn fierceness, "when you made me accomplice in a crime, when you came here to me like this to-night, did you really dream that you could change your mind? Did you suppose you could make me ridiculous again? Do you know where you are? And under what circumstances? There is a slang phrase, Christina—do you really think you can get away with it?"
"No," Christina replied. She quietly lifted her head. Her eyes rested soberly on his. "I am here, with you. I am alone. There is no Rebecca's window here to dash myself from. You see I have counted up everything. And this is what I will do. If I cannot die now, I can die to-morrow. You can not watch me forever. And in the hour when you leave me, I shall find a way to die."