“My God, my God! I can't give her up!” he cried. Now that she was torn from him, he craved her with the awful passion of the man no longer young. A picture of her ripe lips and her fresh, eager face, so quick to flush, floated maddeningly before his closed eyes. Last night on parting he had held her close and kissed her. He felt the yielding softness of her bosom against his breast, could almost feel now the throb of her heart. He bit through his sleeve into his arm.
The paroxysm passed. He must think. The wedding must be postponed. Sylvester had intrusted him with that duty, out of regard for Ella. See her he could not; his soul shrank from it. A cowardly letter to reach her too late for questions to be asked, giving no reasons, simply stating that he was summoned away that night for an indefinite period? It must be written. He grovelled in his self-abasement.
Suddenly he raised his head and stared up, with panting breath and trembling body. A wild, mad idea had sprung from a recrudescence of the forlorn hope with which Sylvester's words had inspired him. He sprang to his feet with a quavering, hysterical laugh.
“By Christ! I'll carry it through,” he cried, and he walked about the room, swinging his arms in great gestures.
CHAPTER XVII—A WEDDING EVE
The room was in a state of bewitching confusion. Trunks, half filled, yawned open on the floor. On the bed were piles of white garments in the midst of which here and there a pink or blue ribbon peeped daintily. Cardboard boxes and tissue paper pervaded space. Hats small and hats immense lay about in unconsidered attitudes upon chintz-covered chairs and other resting-places. A pearl-coloured ball-dress, all gauze and chiffon and foamy nothingness, hung over the bed-rail. A thousand odds and ends—veils, hatpins, mysterious smooth wooden boxes, and cut-glass phials—were strewn on the tables. And the pale morning sunshine streamed in a friendly way into the room.
Ella was superintending her packing. Her maid having gone out for a moment, she sat on the edge of the bed (leaving, with feminine sureness of pose, the dainty piles of garments aforesaid unscathed), and gazed critically at a hat which she held on outstretched fingers thrust into the crown. In a dark silk blouse and a plain skirt, and with her auburn hair somewhat ruffled, she looked very simple and girlish. Lady Milmo, occupying the only vacant chair opposite, also regarded the hat with the eye of experience. The examination had, however, come to an end, for Ella, after flicking the great bows with the finger-tips of her disengaged hand, threw the confection lightly on the top of the pile, and putting her hands in her lap resignedly, turned to her aunt.
“I am sure Josephine will disappoint me with the blue dress.”