“With having endeavoured to mislead you.”
“I only know that I love you, Eva,” I said in softer tones, again tenderly taking her hand. “I only know that I think of no other woman in all the world besides yourself. I only know that I cannot live without your love.”
Her bosom heaved and fell painfully, and from her large blue eyes tears sprang—quick, salt, bitter drops that burned her as they fell.
“Ah, no?” she cried protestingly. “Do not let us talk of that. Do not let us dream of the impossible.”
“Then you really love me?” I cried in quick earnestness, bending over her, my arm about her slim waist.
But she shuddered within my grasp. Her frame was shaken by a convulsive sob, and gazing upon me with serious eyes she, in a low whisper, gave her answer.
“Alas! I cannot—I—I dare not!”
I drew back crushed and hopeless. Once again the strange thought possessed me that Mary Blain held her within her power; that although she actually loved me she feared the relentless vengeance of that woman who posed as her most intimate friend, who smiled upon us both, although in her heart was a fierce and jealous hatred.
Eva’s was a strange character. She seemed a brilliant antithesis—a compound of contradictions—of all that I most detested, of all that I most admired. Her whole character seemed a triumph of the external over the innate; even though she presented at first view a splendid and perplexing anomaly, there was yet deep meaning and wondrous skill in the enigma when I came to analyse and decipher it. What was most astonishing in Eva’s character was its antithetical construction, its consistent inconsistency, which rendered it quite impossible to reduce it to any elementary principles. The impression she gave was that of perpetual and irreconcilable contrast.
In those months I had known her she had enchanted me. Her mental accomplishments, her unequalled grace, her woman’s wit and woman’s wiles, her irresistible allurements, her starts of hauteur, her vivacity of imagination, her petulant caprice, her fickleness and her falsehood, her tenderness and her truth, all had dazzled my faculties and bewitched my fancy. She held absolute dominion over me.