thout a
smile. A fierce, delighted satisfaction ran through me before she spoke.

"What do you insinuate, Victor?" she said, lightly, but with pointed
directness. "That I have been in love with two men at the same time?
No; nothing of my own will nor my own action stands between us.
Forgive, forsooth!" and she gave a delightful, mocking laugh.

"You are the person to be forgiven, if anybody, for inflicting this
year upon me! Now, I ask you to wait a little and you won't!"

"Because I don't see any adequate reason," I returned. "Last year I
told you mine, now I demand yours."

I kept my arm round her, and could feel the pulses in her waist throb
under it, but I turned my eyes away from her and stared fixedly at the
carpet, waiting for her to speak, with the best patience I could
command.

"I have told you till I am tired of telling you I must get better
first," she said, pettishly.

"But you are not getting better," I persisted.

"On the contrary, all these four months you have been getting steadily
worse."

So long a silence followed this that I looked into her face again
suddenly, the lips were quivering, and the eyes brimming with tears.
She turned her head away, but not before I had seen them.

"Dearest, would you rather I released you from your promise to me?" I
said, bending nearer over her. "Do you wish that?"

One single, violent sob shook the lovely breast beneath me and swelled
the throat.

"No," she said, passionately; "you know I don't!"

"There is no alternative between that or our marriage," I said, quietly.

I was not trying to be inflexible, nor to harden my heart against her.
It was hardened by passion, which at no time is an inspirer of
tenderness, and mine had been sufficiently irritated through four
months of alternate excitation and resistance to be determined now. My
difficulty was not to avoid being too tender, but to check myself from
being too harsh. Had I heard my own words in cool blood they might have
seemed hard, and my insistence inconsiderate and blamable, but my calm
was only artificial, and my judgment little else than a blind clinging
to the object with which I had come.

"Why can't you go away for a time and then we can marry later, when you
come back?" she answered, in a weak, evasive tone.

"It is not wholly a question of being away from you," I returned. "So
long as I am engaged to you, Lucia, my whole life is totally different
from that which it would be if I were