Rhea released her hands; her rings seemed almost crushed into her fingers with the tightness of his clasp. She was strangely agitated. She sank into a chair that was half-hidden by two big, branching myrtles.
“You have taken me so by surprise, I can scarcely get my thoughts together,” she said. “I had no idea that such a thing was in your mind!”
He stood in front of her, with his arms folded on his breast, looking down on her.
“Did you think I should come to you day after day and say ‘going, going,’ till someone else said: ‘gone at last, thank Heaven!’ ” he asked bitterly.
“But, must it be?” asked Rhea, of set purpose, making her tone as unemotional and matter-of-fact as possible. “You could keep out of my way without leaving England. You were not compelled to follow me about from house to house as you have been in the habit of doing of late. You need never have crossed my threshold again if to do so gave you pain.”
“Gave me pain! Do you think I am going away in order to save myself pain?” he cried contemptuously. “Why, I would stand torture—infinite torture in every part of my body just for a five minute’s glimpse of you! Rhea, Rhea! don’t you see—can’t you understand that I am going away, not for my own sake, but for yours, because I won’t have you talked about in an intolerable fashion. I have never asked you to marry me. I never would ask you to marry me; I love you too well to ask you to put yourself in what the world would consider a ridiculous position. Two nights ago my mother came to me and told me certain remarks that had been made about you in consequence of my attentions to you; how that people said—No! I won’t repeat the idiotic speeches. When I heard them I said to myself, it is time this was put a stop to; I love her so, I must leave her; I will quit at once and forever take myself out of her life.”
His words had come in a torrent; ended, they left him almost breathless.
Rhea gazed up at him wonderingly. So, then, love might mean something other than a grasping, a holding and a keeping against all heaven and all earth! Sometimes it might mean a leaving and a letting go.
Her hands clasped together nervously. “My poor, poor boy,” she began once more.
He gave her no time to finish. He flung himself on the ground at her feet, kissing the hem of her dress, his hot tears falling here and there on its silver embroideries.
“Rhea, Rhea,” he cried brokenly, “kiss me once, just once, on my forehead, and let me go!”
Rhea bent forward, parted his fair curly hair, and lightly touched his forehead with her lips.
The chair on which she sat stood immediately beneath a window of one of the smaller drawing-rooms. From that room, at that moment, there came a sound of movement and of voices, as if some persons had just entered it.
Trevor sprang to his feet. “God bless you!” he said, in low, tremulous tones. “Forget me; it is all I have to ask of you now!”
Then, with feet that stumbled as they went, he made his way along the verandah, back to the ballroom once more.
Rhea leaned back in her chair, feeling dazed and stupefied. Here was her question—“What is love?”—answered with a vengeance. She felt as one might feel who, having questioned the oracle, expecting to hear the voice of the priest in reply, hears instead the voice of the god himself.
The heavy, odourous air seemed to stifle her. The clanging of the band had ceased now; the roll of carriages in the street below was getting fainter. The golden-grey of the morning, that filtered in through the interstices of the Venetian shutter, fought with and died hard in the glare of the Chinese lantern over her head. Lord Carthewe, no doubt, was seeking her now in the deserted rooms, in order to claim her promise of an interview. She felt utterly unfit to face him and the momentous question whose answer might contain in itself the making or marring of two lives.
Again the sound of voices came to her through the window beneath which she was seated. In a vague sort of way, she found herself listening to them, without knowing who they were, nor feeling much interest in what was being said, until suddenly three little words, “our last valse,” fell upon her ear, in tones that were unmistakably her cousin Dulcie’s.
Yet how strangely unlike Dulcie’s usual tones they were! The words seemed to be sighed rather than spoken.
Was it possible, Rhea asked herself, that the foolish little maiden had let her heart be taken captive at her very first ball by some possibly ineligible suitor? Now, who could be the person whom she was addressing in such a pathetic voice—a landless younger son, an impecunious German princelet?
Rhea did not have long to wait for an answer to her question. Slow, distinct and charged with passion, came a masculine voice in reply. “Our last valse! Yes. Life comes to an end for me tonight. Oh! my darling, my darling, why did we ever meet thus, only to part?”
“My darling! my darling!” And the voice in which these words were said was that of Reginald, Lord Carthewe!
Rhea put her hand to her forehead. Was she dreaming—what did it all mean? There fell a silence; then Dulcie’s voice was heard again.
“It has been all Rhea’s doing from first to last,” she said, speaking falteringly and with the sound of
