anger: "give me one word of truth! When
I know such a horror as that, how can I keep myself from wishing to save
you? What would you think of me if I should stand still and see you
go back to your reward? 'It's awful, what she'll have to pay for
it!'--that's what Touchett said to me. I may tell you that, mayn't I? He
was such a near relation!" cried Goodwood, making his queer grim point
again. "I'd sooner have been shot than let another man say those things
to me; but he was different; he seemed to me to have the right. It was
after he got home--when he saw he was dying, and when I saw it too.
I understand all about it: you're afraid to go back. You're perfectly
alone; you don't know where to turn. You can't turn anywhere; you know
that perfectly. Now it is therefore that I want you to think of ME."

"To think of 'you'?" Isabel said, standing before him in the dusk. The
idea of which she had caught a glimpse a few moments before now loomed
large. She threw back her head a little; she stared at it as if it had
been a comet in the sky.

"You don't know where to turn. Turn straight to me. I want to persuade
you to trust me," Goodwood repeated. And then he paused with his shining
eyes. "Why should you go back--why should you go through that ghastly
form?"

"To get away from you!" she answered. But this expressed only a little
of what she felt. The rest was that she had never been loved before. She
had believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the
desert, at the approach of which the others dropped dead, like mere
sweet airs of the garden. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her
feet, while the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and
strange, forced open her set teeth.

At first, in rejoinder to what she had said, it seemed to her that
he would break out into greater violence. But after an instant he was
perfectly quiet; he wished to prove he was sane, that he had reasoned it
all out. "I want to prevent that, and I think I may, if you'll only for
once listen to me. It's too monstrous of you to think of sinking back
into that misery, of going to open your mouth to that poisoned air. It's
you that are out of your mind. Trust me as if I had the care of you. Why
shouldn't we be happy--when it's here before us, when it's so easy? I'm
yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock.
What have you to care about? You've no children; that perhaps would be
an obstacle. As