Peter was more than disappointed--he was positively disgusted at this exceedingly tame conclusion; it _did_ seem hard that, even under conditions when any act of daring might have been possible to him, he could do nothing more brilliant than this. It was really worse than the monkey business!
"I'm afraid you make too much of the very little I did," he said.
"Do I? Perhaps that is because if you had not done it, we should never have come to know one another as we do!" (So far, it was a very one-sided sort of knowledge, Peter thought.) "And yet," she added, with a long-drawn sigh, "I sometimes think that we should both be happier if we never _had_ known one another; if you had stood aside, and the lead had struck me, and I had died!"
"No, no!" said Peter, unfeignedly alarmed at this morbid reflection, "you mustn't take such a gloomy view of it as all that, you know!"
"Why not?" she said, in a sombre tone. "It _is_ gloomy--_how_ gloomy I know better than you!" ("She might well do that," thought Tourmalin.) "Why did I not see that I was slowly, imperceptibly drifting--drifting?"
"Well," said Peter, with a levity he was far from feeling, "if the drifting was imperceptible, you naturally _wouldn't_ see it, you know!"
"You might have spared a joke at such a time as this!" she cried, indignantly.
"I--I wasn't aware there was a close time for jokes," he said, humbly; "not that it was much of a joke!"
"Indeed it was not," she replied. "But oh, Peter, _how_ we have both drifted!"
"Have we?" he exclaimed, blankly. "I--I mean--_haven't_ we?"
"I was so blind--so wilfully, foolishly blind! I told myself we were friends!"
"Surely we are?" he said, retaking possession of her hand; he had entirely forgotten Sophia in the ironmongery department, at Tottenham Court Road. "I--I understood we were on that footing?"
"No," she said; "let us have no subterfuges any more--we must look facts in the face. After what we have both said to-night, we can no longer deceive ourselves by words.... Peter," she broke off suddenly, "I am going to ask you a question, and on your answer my fate--and yours too, perhaps--will depend! Tell me truthfully...." Her voice failed her for the moment, as she bent over towards him, and clutched his arm tightly in her excitement; her eyes shone with a wild, intense eagerness for his reply.... "Would you----" she repeated....