Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/33

Rh Jean hesitated. "Everything has made me change."

"Well," said Tony, with a smile so strained that he felt it almost pitiful, "we've spoken of the disappointment to others, but I suppose there's no use in my attempting to say anything of the disappointment to me. That's not the thing that, in such a case, can have much effect on you."

Again Jean hesitated: he saw how pale she had grown. "Do I understand you tell me that you really desire my marriage?"

If the revelation of how he desired it had not already come to him the deep mystery of her beauty at this crisis might have brought it on the spot—a spectacle in which he so lost himself for the minute that he found no words to answer till she spoke again. "Do I understand that you literally ask me for it?"

"1 ask you for it—I ask you for it," said Tony Bream.

They stood looking at each other like a pair who, walking on a frozen lake, suddenly have in their ears the great crack of the ice. "And what are your reasons?"