Page:Anthony Hope - The Kings Mirror.djvu/178

 next moment. "We can't go on as if nothing had happened."

"I don't know."

"You don't know! Yet you're hard as iron about it. Oh, I daresay you're right; you must be. It's only a little sooner."

She turned her back to me, and stood looking down into the fire. I was trying to answer her question, to realize how it would be between us, how, having lived in the real, we must now dwell in the unreal with one another. I was wondering how I could meet her and not show that I loved her, how I could love her and yet be true to my idol, the conception that governed me. Suddenly she spoke, without turning or lifting her head.

"Whom shall you send to Paris?"

"I don't know. I haven't settled

"Wetter mentioned somebody else—besides himself?"

"Only Max," said I, with a dreary laugh.

"Hadn't you better send Max? That is, if you think him fit for it."

I thought that she was relieving her petulance by a bitter jest; but a moment later she said again, still without turning round:

"Send Max."

I rose and walked slowly to where she stood. Hearing my movement, she faced me.

"Send Max," she said again, holding out her hands toward me, clasped together. "I—I can't stay here like—in the way you say. And you? How could you do it?"

"You would go with him?" I exclaimed.

"Of course."

"For five years?"