“No, no, my dear,” said Martin. He touched her shoulder, warm and soft. Only the convention of a diaphanous flimsy sleeve gave sanction. She let his hand remain there for a moment or two; then gripped it and flung it away. But the nervous clasp of her fingers denied resentment. She turned a white face.
“I knew you loved me. It was good, as I’ve told you, to feel it. I meant to escape as I’ve escaped before. I don’t excuse myself. Then came the night at Luxor. I let myself go. It was a thing of the senses. Something snapped, as it has done in the case of millions of women under similar conditions. You could have done what you liked with me. I shall never forget if I live to be ninety. Do you think I’ve been sleeping peacefully all these nights ever since? I haven’t.”
She looked at him defiantly. Said Martin:
“You must care for me—a little. The veriest little is all I dare ask for.”
“No, it isn’t,” she answered, meeting his eyes. “Don’t delude yourself. You are asking for everything. And if I had everything to give I would give it to you. You may think I have played with you heartlessly for the last three or four weeks. Any outsider knowing the bare facts would accuse me. Perhaps I ought to have sent you away; but I hadn’t the strength. There. That’s a confession. Make what you will of it.”
“All I can make of it,” said Martin tremulously, “is that you’re the woman for me, and that you know it.”
“I do,” she said. “I’m up against facts and I face them squarely. On the other hand you’re not the man for me. If ever a woman has tried to love a man, I’ve tried to love you. That’s why I’ve made you stay. I’ve plucked my heart out—all, all but the roots. There’s a dead man there, at the roots”—she flung out both hands and her shoulders heaved—“and he is always up between us, and I can’t, I can’t. It’s no use. I must give myself altogether, or not at all. I’m not built for the half-and-half things.”
He sat grim, feeling more a stone than a man. She clutched his arm.
“Suppose I did marry you. By all the rules of the game I ought to. But it would only be misery for both of us. There would be twenty thousand causes for misery. Don’t you see?”
“I see everything,” said Martin. He rose and leaned both elbows on the verandah and faced her with bent brows. “I see everything. You have put your case very clearly. But suppose I say that you haven’t played the game. Suppose I say that you should have known that no man who wasn’t in love with you—except an imbecile—would have followed you to Egypt as I’ve done. Suppose I say that you’ve played havoc with my life. Suppose I instance everything that has passed between us, and I assert the rules of the game, and I ask you as a man, shaken to his centre with love of you, to marry me, what would you say?”