Part 34 (1/2)
he answered.
He put his hand upon hers as it rested on her knee, and drew her towards him; but she resisted the movement, and he noticed that her fingers, which pushed his own away, were cold.
”Tell me,” he said. ”What has been the matter? You have made me very unhappy.”
”There's nothing to tell,” she answered. ”Only ...”
”Only what?”
”I don't think you know what love is,” she murmured, and her voice was so low that her words were almost lost in the darkness.
”But that is just what I was going to say to you,” he replied.
She uttered a little laugh. ”It seems that we shall always interpret things differently,” she said.
She turned to him, and in the obscurity his face seemed strange to her.
She could not construct the features, nor supply the well-known lines now lost in the shadow. She saw only the great forehead, faintly white, and the upper part of his cheeks; but his eyes were hidden in two deep cavities of blackness, and all expression was extinguished.
”There will always be these misunderstandings,” he told her, ”so long as you are tied to this sort of social life.”
”I prefer it to the underworld,” she answered, and her heart beat, for she was launching her attack.
”What d'you mean by the 'underworld'?” he asked.
”The world that Lizette belongs to,” she replied.
She had said it!-she had hurled her lightning, and now she waited for the roll of the thunder. But there was no cracking of the heavens: only silence; and, as she waited, she could feel the beating of her pulse in her throat.
At last he spoke, and his voice was quiet and clear.
”Please tell me exactly what Cousin Charles has said about Lizette.”
She turned quickly on him. ”Why should you think it was Charles Barthampton who told me?”
”Because I was with Lizette the day I first met him,” he answered.
”Then you don't deny it?”
”Deny it?” he repeated, with scorn in his voice. ”Why on earth should I deny it?”
She shrugged her shoulders. ”A man generally denies that sort of thing to the girl he wants to marry,” she said.
”That only shows how little you understand me,” he replied, and there was despair in his words.
”O, I understand you well enough,” she answered, bitterly. ”You are just like all men. But what I can't understand is how you could be going about with that woman at the same time that you were making love to me.”
Again he was silent. It seemed that he had to turn her words over in his mind before their significance was clear.
”You mean,” he said at length, ”that if I had told you Lizette was an old flame of mine now set aside, you would have condoned it?”
”Women have to forgive a great deal in the men they love,” she answered.