“Than for you—to be with me.”
And again she was afraid. Was she to be conquered by this? She cowered close to him, very close to him. They sat perfectly still, listening to the great, heavy, beating sound of the town, the murmur of lovers going by, the footsteps of soldiers.
She shivered against him.
“You are cold?” he said.
“A little.”
“We will go and have some supper.”
He was now always quiet and decided and remote, very beautiful. He seemed to have some strange, cold power over her.
They went to a restaurant, and drank chianti. But his pale, wan look did not go away.
“Don’t leave me to-night,” he said at length, looking at her, pleading. He was so strange and impersonal, she was afraid.
“But the people of my place,” she said, quivering.
“I will explain to them—they know we are engaged.”
She sat pale and mute. He waited.
“Shall we go?” he said at length.
“Where?”
“To an hotel.”
Her heart was hardened. Without answering, she rose to acquiesce. But she was now cold and unreal. Yet she could not refuse him. It seemed like fate, a fate she did not want.
They went to an Italian hotel somewhere, and had a sombre bedroom with a very large bed, clean, but sombre. The ceiling was painted with a bunch of flowers in a big medallion over the bed. She thought it was pretty.
He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel cleaving and clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was fierce but cold. But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their passion this night. He slept with her fast in his arms. All night long he held her fast against him. She was passive, acquiscent. But her sleep was not very deep nor very real.
She woke in the morning to a sound of water dashed on a courtyard, to sunlight streaming through a lattice. She thought she was in a foreign country. And Skrebensky was there an incubus upon her.
She lay still, thinking, whilst his arm was round her, his head against her shoulders, his body against hers, just behind her. He was still asleep.
She watched the sunshine coming in bars through the persiennes, and her immediate surroundings again melted away.
She was in some other land, some other world, where the old restraints had dissolved and vanished, where one moved freely, not afraid of one’s fellow men, nor wary, nor on the defensive, but calm, indifferent,