ack as if struggling for breath. It
was the sight of her eyes fixed on him, dark with a sort of fascinated
fright, which pulled him together and changed that painful incoherence
to anger.

"Is it so very unnatural?" he said between his teeth, "Is it unnatural
to want a child from one's own wife? You wrecked our life and put this
blight on everything. We go on only half alive, and without any future.
Is it so very unflattering to you that in spite of everything I--I still
want you for my wife? Speak, for Goodness' sake! do speak."

Irene seemed to try, but did not succeed.

"I don't want to frighten you," said Soames more gently. "Heaven knows.
I only want you to see that I can't go on like this. I want you back. I
want you."

Irene raised one hand and covered the lower part of her face, but her
eyes never moved from his, as though she trusted in them to keep him at
bay. And all those years, barren and bitter, since--ah! when?--almost
since he had first known her, surged up in one great wave of
recollection in Soames; and a spasm that for his life he could not
control constricted his face.

"It's not too late," he said; "it's not--if you'll only believe it."

Irene uncovered her lips, and both her hands made a writhing gesture in
front of her breast. Soames seized them.

"Don't!" she said under her breath. But he stood holding on to them,
trying to stare into her eyes which did not waver. Then she said
quietly:

"I am alone here. You won't behave again as you once behaved."

Dropping her hands as though they had been hot irons, he turned away.
Was it possible that there could be such relentless unforgiveness! Could
that one act of violent possession be still alive within her? Did it bar
him thus utterly? And doggedly he said, without looking up:

"I am not going till you've answered me. I am offering what few men
would bring themselves to offer, I want a--a reasonable answer."

And almost with surprise he heard her say:

"You can't have a reasonable answer. Reason has nothing to do with it.
You can only have the brutal truth: I would rather die."

Soames stared at her.

"Oh!" he said. And there intervened in him a sort of paralysis of speech
and movement, the kind of quivering which comes when a man has received
a deadly insult, and does not yet know how he is going to take it, or
rather what it is going to do with him.

"Oh!" he said again, "as bad as that? Indeed! You would rather die.
That's pretty!