Page:The Prussian officer, and other stories, Lawrence, 1914.djvu/140

 as she grew white. She was to him something steady and immovable and eternal presented to him. His heart was hot in an anguish of suspense. Sharp twitches of fear and pain were in his limbs. He turned his whole body away from her. The silence was unendurable. He could not bear her to sit there any more. It made his heart go hot and stifled in his breast.

“Were you going out to-night?” she asked.

“Only to the New Inn,” he said.

Again there was silence.

She reached for her hat. Nothing else was suggested to her. She had to go. He sat waiting for her to be gone, for relief. And she knew that if she went out of that house as she was, she went out a failure. Yet she continued to pin on her hat; in a moment she would have to go. Something was carrying her.

Then suddenly a sharp pang, like lightning, seared her from head to foot, and she was beyond herself.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked, controlled, yet speaking out of a fiery anguish, as if the words were spoken from her without her intervention.

He went white under his dirt.

“Why?” he asked, turning to her in fear, compelled.

“Do you want me to go?” she repeated.

“Why?” he asked again.

“Because I wanted to stay with you,” she said, suffocated, with her lungs full of fire.

His face worked, he hung forward a little, suspended, staring straight into her eyes, in torment, in an agony of chaos, unable to collect himself. And