She hid her face in her arms.
“Must I go on? Must I tell you—can you not imagine, oh! Jack—”
He did not stir; his eyes seemed dead.
“I—I was so young, I knew nothing, and he said—said that he loved me—”
Trent rose and struck the candle with his clenched fist, and the room was dark.
The bells of St. Sulpice tolled the hour, and she started up, speaking with feverish haste—“I must finish! When you told me you loved me—you—you asked me nothing; but then, even then, it was too late, and that other life which binds me to him, must stand forever between you and me! For there is another whom he has claimed, and is good to. He must not die—they cannot shoot him, for that other’s sake!”
Trent sat motionless, but his thoughts ran on in an interminable whirl.
Sylvia, little Sylvia, who shared with him his student life—who bore with him the dreary desolation of the siege without complaint—this slender blue-eyed girl whom he was so quietly fond of, whom he teased or caressed as the whim suited, who sometimes made him the least bit impatient with her passionate devotion to him—could this be the same Sylvia who lay weeping there in the darkness?
Then he clinched his teeth. “Let him die! Let him die!”—but then—for Sylvia’s sake, and—for that other’s sake—Yes, he would go—he must go—his duty was plain before him. But Sylvia—he could not be what he had been to her, and yet a vague terror seized him, now all was said. Trembling, he struck a light.
She lay there, her curly hair tumbled about her face, her small white hands pressed to her breast.