“That’s monstrous,” he declared with a flash in his eyes. “To turn you out of your home—I should feel a scoundrel.”
“I don’t see how we can go on living together, carrying on as usual, as though nothing had happened.”
For a few moments they walked up the gravelled path in silence, both bareheaded in the mild May sunshine.
“Listen,” he said, coming to a pause. “I’m a man who has learned self-control in three hard schools—my Scotch father’s, science, war. If I swear to you, on my honour, that nothing that has passed between us to-day shall ever be revived by me in look or word or act—will you stay with us, and give me your—your friendship—your companionship—your presence in the house? It was an aching desert all the time you were away.”
She walked on a pace or two, after a hopeless sigh. Could she never drive into this unworldly head the fact that women were not sexless angels? How could their eyes forever meet in the glance of a polite couple discussing the weather across a tea-table? She could not resist a shaft of mockery.
“For all of your philosopher father and science and war—I wonder, my dear Blaise, how much you really know of life?”
He halted and put a hand on her slim shoulder.
“I love you so much my dear,” said he, “that I should be content to hang crucified before you, so that my eyes could rest upon you till I died.”
He turned and strode fast away. She followed him crying “Blaise! Blaise!” He half turned with an arresting arm—and even at that moment she was touched by the pathos of the other empty sleeve——
“No, don’t—please.”