Hector had not said a word that she must rebuke him for; they had just
waltzed and thrilled, and been--happy!
And now she was going to eat some supper with him, and forget there were
any to-morrows.
They found a secluded corner, and spent half an hour in perfect peace.
Hector was an artist in pleasing women--and to-night, though he never
once transgressed in words, she could feel through it all that he loved
her--loved her madly. His voice was so tender and deep, and his thought
for her slightest wish and comfort so evident; he was masterful, too,
and settled what she was to do--where to sit, and now and then he made
her look at him.
He was just so wildly happy he could not stop to count the cost; and
while he worshipped her more deeply than when they had sat on the soft
greensward at Versailles, even the whole sight of her pure soul now
could not stop him--now he knew she loved him, and that there were
possible others on the scene. She had trusted him--had appealed to his
superior strength; he did not forget that fact quite--but here at a ball
was not the place to analyze what it would mean. They were just two
guests dancing and supping like the rest, and were supremely content.
He found out where she was going for Whitsuntide, but said nothing of
his own intentions.
The blindness and madness of love was upon him and held him in complete
bondage. The first shock, which her look of the wounded fawn had given
him, was over. They had suffered, and made good resolutions, and parted,
and now they had met again. And he could not, and would not, think where
they might drift to.
To be near her, to look into her eyes, to be conscious of her
personality was what he asked at the moment, what he must have. The
rest of time was a blank, and meaningless. It is not every man who
loves in this way--fortunately for the rest of the world! Many go
through life with now and then a different woman merely as an episode,
as far as anything but a physical emotion is concerned. Sport, or their
own ambitions, fill up their real interests, and no woman could break
their hearts.
But Hector was not of these. And this woman had it in her power to make
his heaven or hell.
They had both passed through moments of exalted sentiment, even a little
dramatic in their tragedy and renunciation, but circumstance is stronger
always than any highly strung emotion of good or evil. At the end of
their good-bye at Madrid their story should have closed, as the stories
in books so often do, with the hero and heroine worked up to some
wonderful pitch of self-sacrifice and drama. They so seldom tell of the
flatness of the afterwards. The impossibility of retaining a balance on
this high pinnacle of moral valor, where circumstance, which is a
commonplace and often material thing, decrees that the lights shall not
be turned out with the ring-down of the curtain.