“Better lose no time, then,” said Tito, with unmixed suavity, moving his cap round in his hands as if he were about to put it on and depart.
“And now, Romola, you will perhaps be able to see, in spite of prejudice, that my wishes go with yours in this matter. You will not regard the misfortune of my safety as an offence.”
Something like an electric shock passed through Romola: it was the full consciousness of her husband’s presence returning to her. She looked at him without speaking.
“At least,” he added, in a slightly harder tone, “you will endeavour to base our intercourse on some other reasonings than that because an evil deed is possible, I have done it. Am I alone to be beyond the pale of your extensive charity?”
The feeling which had been driven back from Romola’s lips a fortnight before rose again with the gathered force of a tidal wave. She spoke with a decision which told him that she was careless of consequences.
“It is too late, Tito. There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten. And now I know everything. I know who that old man was: he was your father, to whom you owe everything—to whom you owe more than if you had been his own child. By the side of that, it is a small thing that you broke my trust and my father’s. As long as you deny the truth about that old man, there is a horror rising between us: the law that should make us one can never be obeyed. I too am a human being. I have a soul of my own that abhors your actions. Our union is a pretence—as if a perpetual lie could be a sacred marriage.”
Tito did not answer immediately. When he did speak it was with a calculated caution, that was stimulated by alarm.
“And you mean to carry out that independence by quitting me, I presume?”