“I don’t understand,” he said, rising and confronting her. “What is the secret about you?—there was always mystery around you.”
“No,” she answered. “There was no mystery four years ago, except the mystery of our dream. My secret then was only a small matter. I was just a runaway. I had left my husband because I wanted my freedom, and to follow my art in freedom. I had changed my name because I feared to be called back. But now he is dead, and I have nothing to fear in that direction.... No, there was no secret—then.”
“But now?—please tell me, Monimé,” he urged. “I want to know, I _must_ know.”
Once more she fenced with him, and their words became useless. At length, however, his questions brought a crisis near to them again. She clenched and unclenched her hands. “I beg you, go away now,” she urged. “Forget me; go back to your freedom. There is something here which will trap you if you stay. Oh, can’t you understand? Don’t you see that I can’t tell whether Fate has brought you here for your happiness, or even for my happiness, or whether it is for our sorrow that you have been brought. I can’t tell, I can’t tell! We are almost strangers to one another.”
He put his arms about her and held her to him. She neither shrank from him, nor responded to him. At that moment all else in time, all else in life, was blotted from his mind, and he knew only that he had found again the lost gateway of his dreams.
“You must speak out,” he cried. “I must know all that there is to know about you. You must explain what you mean.”
She made a movement from him, and suddenly it seemed that her mind was resolved. “Very well, then,” she said. “Come with me into the house.”
She led the way in silence down the pathway, and through a doorway almost hidden beneath the creepers. A dark passage, screened by a curtain, led into a square hall, softly lit by candles; and at one side of this a stone staircase passed up to a gallery from which two doors opened.
To one of these doors she brought him, a shaded candle held in her hand. Her face was turned from him as they entered the room, and he could not tell what her expression might be; but her step was stealthy and her finger was held up.
Then, suddenly, as in a flash, he understood; and instantly he knew what he was going to see in the little bed which stood against the wall.