The shadows of evening grew deeper; the fire of the afterglow began to pale, the gold of the twilight to give place to grey.
“Ma mignonne,” whispered Val, “where are your thoughts—tell me!”
She started and turned her eyes full on him. Was it his fancy once more, or were they again glistening as with unshed tears?
“Oh, Val,” she answered in a low tone that had something of a wail in it, “when I think of—of everything—the hopelessness of it all, and the goodbye we must, sooner or later, say to each other, I sometimes wish I had lain down in my grave before I had seen your face.”
A sudden fire leapt into his eye.
“Do you expect me to echo that wish?” he asked, “and say ‘I would that I had lain down in my grave before I met that girl?’ If I did, it would be a lie. Supposing Fate had come to me and said ‘Here, in this hand, are six months of your usual listless, vacuous existence coupled with your usual listless, vacuous feelings; and here, in the other, are six months of wild, maddening passion, together with wild, maddening pain.’ I should have said, ‘Give me that—the passion and the pain together! Yes, the passion, a thousand times more delirious—more enthralling than my heart has power to conceive, and let me buy it with torture now, with torture hereafter; so that I have it for one mad, delirious six months of my life, I care not!’ ”
It was all said in his usual level and slightly cynical tone. Only a very old, or very intimate friend of Val Thorndyke’s, listening to him and catching a glimpse of that fire in his eye, would have ventured to say: “That man is in deadly earnest at last!”
While he had been speaking all sorts of expressions, like so many summer clouds, had gone sweeping over Fay’s more easily read features.
Was she afraid of what they might speak to him that she suddenly bowed her head, covering her face with both hands?
He was kneeling at her feet in a moment, trying to withdraw those hands. Then his arm encircled her; he drew her head upon his shoulder, and still kneeling beside her, covered her brow, her hair with impassioned kisses.
She made no effort to free herself. Ah! if she could but have held up her finger to old Time and bade him stand still! “O sun dare not to rise!” she would have cried, like one in bygone days; “dare not to bring in another dawn of bondage and misery! Let this glamour of twilight know no ending, this rest, this love be my eternity!”
But even as the thought filled her mind the glamour of twilight had gone. It was the shades of night that were gathering about them now.
With the shadows of the night came its stillness also. No wing of sea-fowl nor distant cry of heron broke the silence now. The tide was ebbing fast, and even the wash of the waves sounded muffled and far away.
Val, with his lips close to her ear, whispered a few words. They were:
“Let us summon our courage, my darling, break our bonds, shake off our chains and claim our lives for our own.”
Softly as the words were spoken, they seemed to sound like a fanfaronade of trumpets in the stillness of the air. Fay could fancy that the very rocks beneath whose shadow their boat lay had caught the echo of them and were flinging them back at her.
She gave a great start, but for moment did not speak.
Val went on lingeringly, persuasively: “It is only half-an-hour’s row out to Archie’s yacht. There is no one but Archie and the four sailors on board—he is true as steel, you know. Only whisper ‘Yes,’ ma mignonne, and the thing is done. We will sail the yacht just wherever you will like best to go—Italy, Corsica, Algiers?”
Fay was trembling from head to foot now, but still she did not open her lips. “Think,” he went on, his voice rising louder and more distinct, “what you will escape from—what you will escape to! Your life your own to do what you will with! The glorious freedom! You and I alone on the wide ocean, no one to come between us, no goodbyes to be said! No more of the dismal old Bastille—one delicious round of enjoyment from year’s end to year’s end!”
But Fay’s lips were still dumb.
“People are doing it every day in the week,” he went on, his voice once more sinking to a low, persuasive tone. “A marriage such as you would make is no true marriage; the true marriage bond is between heart and heart, soul and soul.”
“Oh, stop, stop!” said Fay, with a sudden, sharp, piteous cry, as she lifted her white face with its aureola of ruffled hair from his shoulder, “what are you saying? I did not come out tonight to hear such words as these! It would break my mother’s heart!”
“Your mother’s heart?” repeated Val, with a slow, scornful emphasis. “Will you tell me that a woman who will sell her daughter to the highest bidder has such a foolish thing as a heart in her organism? Did she think of your heart, I wonder, when she hunted you into saying ‘Yes’ to a man old enough to be your father? Has not she brought you here to Orchol Castle for the whole and sole purpose of clenching your bonds still more tightly, and—”
“Oh, stop, stop!” again cried Fay in sharp, piteous tones. “Let me think—for pity’s sake, let me think!”
Her words came in short gasps. She released herself from his encircling arm, sinking back in the boat, with her trembling hands tightly clasped together and her eyes downcast and half-veiled by their long lashes.
Val still kneeled beside her, with his strong gaze fixed upon those downcast eyes.
Once more the silence of the night seemed to make itself felt; the shadows
