"Why, Maurice!--calm! It's only that loving you--having you to love me is so great, so wonderful, that even yet I can only feel the thankfulness--the beauty. Don't you know that when you are gone my life will be only a waiting?" The tremor of pain in her, her trust in him, roused again a flare of his manliness.
"Not for long, dearest. Waiting isn't a keen enough word for what I shall feel. Longing, longing, until I see you again."
"Oh! it will be keener than mere waiting with me, too." She felt dimly that she must not shackle him in the fight he was going to make for her by showing him what pain to her would be in the waiting.
They walked on. As they neared the house Felicia said, in a voice that had regained its quiet, "We must tell papa."
Again in Maurice was that crumbling. The last embers of intoxication seemed, as she spoke, to die, to leave him looking at ashen realities. He would conquer poverty. Yes; but bind himself and her to face it--as yet menacing and unconquered? That would be to wrong her more deeply than she could understand. She must be free--free before the world; and fidelity to him merely a matter of feeling. And, thinking of freedom, his mind, with a pang of self-scorn, looked back for an ugly moment at the forfeited refuge--at Angela--not yet openly forfeited.
"No, dearest," he said, flushing in the twilight and feeling that, in spite of its loss of intoxication, his love for her had never been so strong as in its uprising over such thoughts, "Not yet. Let it be our secret. My affairs are in such a mess--I must not go to your father until they are really straightened. I really ought not to have told you until they were straight; but I could not help that. It seemed almost weak-spirited to go without telling you, for such a grubby little reason--a reason that can't touch us--but that must shut out others. Don't you think so? Darling, I have not hurt you--already?"
Nothing in the bent, listening profile told him so; the fear came with a sudden glimpse of a craven self, lest she should see it too. But the eyes raised to his held, with a new patience, no new vision of him. Her smile in its grave acceptance of burdens still found joy in the bearing of burdens for their love's sake. "No; how could it hurt me? I see that you are right. We will keep our secret to ourselves for a little while." It was now her trust that seemed to him almost as terrible as the dreaded lack of it had been. Cruel, he thought, that mere material circumstance should toss one's helpless mind like a shuttlecock from one fear to another. But--"Only a very little while," he said, nerving himself to be what she thought him.