“Yes, I know. You are thinking of your father, of whom you have told me; perhaps, too, of my mother, of whom I told you. When she knows you and learns to love you, as she will, we can be married before all the world. We could now were I not dependent on her. Yet then, am I not dependent too on you? Come with me, and afterward—”
“I cannot,” the girl cried; “it would kill my father.”
“You have but to wire him that you have gone to be married, and it will be the truth.”
“I cannot,” the girl repeated. “Oh, what are you asking me to do?”
“I am asking you to be my wife. What is the ceremony to you? What are a few words mumbled by a hired priest? Love, love alone, is marriage.”
“No, no. To you perhaps. But not to me.”
“And the ceremony shall follow as soon as we can manage. Can you not trust me for that?”
“But—”
“Will you not trust me? If you are to put your whole life into my keeping you should at least begin by doing that.”
The girl looked at the man and then away, at vistas he could not see, the winding slopes of asphodel, the sudden and precipitate abyss. Yet he spoke so fair, she told herself. Surely it was to the slopes he meant to take her, not to that blackening pit.
“Yet if you won’t,” Loftus continued, “it is best for both that we should part.”
“For—for always?”
“Yes.”