Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the last, it will have its word.
Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.
"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and slowly; now----"
Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.
Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her soul--and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the moment before.
"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would--I believe he would kill you."
Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.
"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no man that lives."
"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered: "afraid and ashamed."
"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the splendid passion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way. Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."
It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result. Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was somehow inexplicably true.
Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His passion fell from him. His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he was pleading forgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.