no matter
whom--this afternoon! Victor, if not now, that day you desire will
never come. I shall never be your own. Think how it has receded and
receded into time! We have been engaged now more than three years!"

She paused in front of me, and lifted her face--brilliant, glowing,
appealing--with an intensity of passionate, eager longing in it that
defied her words to express. Her whole form quivered with excitement,
till I saw the laces of her dress tremble. On the bodice beneath my
eyes, the lace fell from the shoulders, and its folds on each side
divided slightly in the centre, leaving a depression there in which the
rose-colour glowed crimson. It riveted my eyes this line--this channel
of colour burnt fiercely beneath my lids.

I could see nothing but it; it seemed everywhere, to fill the room, to
scorch into my brain, this palpitating, throbbing, crimson line. That
terrible impulse of blind excitement was rapidly drawing me into
itself--the impulse that counts nothing, knows nothing, reckons nothing
but itself; that will buy the present hour at any sacrifice--that
accepts everything, ignores everything but that one moment it feels
approaching. This impulse urged me, pressed me, strained violently upon
me.

It left me barely conscious of anything except the absorbing longing to
take her, draw her close, hard into my arms, and say, "Yes, let all go;
from this day henceforward you are mine." But almost unconsciously to
myself my reason rebelled against being thus thrust down and trampled
upon by this sudden, brute instinct rushing furiously through my frame,
and my reason clutched me and clung to me and maintained its hold, and,
feeling myself wrenched asunder by these two opposite forces, I stood
immovable and silent.

"Victor," she said, after a minute, and the warm, white uncertain hand
sought mine again and held it, "I have been working hard since you
left, and the canvas is nearly finished, but I am willing to relinquish
it for the present, to let it go. In all this time you have been away
from me I have been slowly learning that one's own life and one's own
life's happiness is of more worth than these abstract ideas, than one's
work or talent or anything else. I have been feeling that you and I are
letting day after day go by and are working for a to-morrow that for us
may never come. Is this your philosophy?"

I looked down on her as she clasped my hand and drew it up to her
breast, her eyes were on mine