ou force me to own the doubt that has made me
miserable ever since I have been here. Are you indeed as changed towards
me as you seem? Do you really no longer love me as you once loved me in
the days that are gone?"

He rose, and walked away a few paces, leaning over the parapet with his
face in his hands.

I sat alone, not knowing what to say or do. The uneasy sense in me that
he had reason to complain of my treating him coldly, was not to be
dismissed from my mind by any effort that I could make. He had no right
to expect me to take the step which he had proposed--there were
objections to it which any woman would have felt in my place. Still,
though I was satisfied of this, there was an obstinate something in me
which would take his part. It could not have been my conscience surely
which said to me--'There was a time when his entreaties would have
prevailed on you; there was a time when you would not have hesitated as
you are hesitating now?'

Whatever the influence was, it moved me to rise from my seat, and to join
him at the parapet.

"You cannot expect me to decide on such a serious matter as this at
once," I said. "Will you give me a little time to think?"

"You are your own mistress," he rejoined bitterly. "Why ask me to give you
time? You can take any time you please--you can do as you like."

"Give me till the end of the week," I went on. "Let me be sure that my
father persists in not answering either your letter or mine. Though I
_am_ my own mistress, nothing but his silence can justify me in going
away secretly, and being married to you by a stranger. Don't press me,
Oscar! It isn't very long to the end of the week."

Something seemed to startle him--something in my voice perhaps which told
him that I was really distressed. He looked round at me quickly, and
caught me with the tears in my eyes.

"Don't cry, for God's sake!" he said. "It shall be as you wish. Take your
time. We will say no more about it till the end of the week."

He kissed me in a hurried startled way, and gave me his arm to walk back.

"Grosse is coming to-day," he continued. "He mustn't see you looking as
you are looking now. You must rest and compose yourself. Come home."

I went back with him, feeling--oh, so sad and sore at heart! My last
faint hope of a renewal of my once-pleasant intimacy with Madame
Pratolungo was at an end. She stood revealed to me now as a woman whom I
ought never to have known--a woman with whom I could