Her troubled breast heaved and fell beneath her rich fur. She gazed at him with parted lips.
“It is a question from me to you,” he went on, “the question of my life.”
“No, don’t think so,” she protested, “please, don’t ask it.”
“Then don’t answer it, Liane. Wait—let me wait. Ask yourself—”
“I know my own mind already,” she said slowly, with earnestness; then perceiving, as suddenly as she had all the rest, how considered her assertion might appear, she went on, still with the quietness of clear-seeing and truth-telling: “things come clear in an instant. This does, that I could not have thought of. I am already betrothed to another; that is why I cannot accept.”
“You can’t expect me to be satisfied with that,” he answered. “I, who know myself, and who see you as you do not see yourself. It is I who ask: who want to take a great gift. I am not offering myself,” he went on rapidly. “I am beseeching yourself—of you.”
“I have not myself to give,” she said calmly.
“You mean you love someone else,” he said, with a hardness about the corners of his mouth.
“Yes,” and the long eyelashes swept downward as she answered.
But Zertho paid no attention to her reply. “During the years I have known you, Liane,” he went on, “the thought of you has been as a safeguard against my total disbelief in the possibility of woman’s fidelity. I knew then that I revered you with my better self all the while—that, young as you were, I believed in you. I believe in you now. Be my wife, and from this instant I will devote all the love in me—and I have more than you think—to you alone.”