ing for those things that I can put into
them. I have nothing in my life and I am not meant for such a lot. I
am not meant for that! Such an existence has bitter temptations for
every man, and although I have never seen you before, possibly my fate
and Pollona's rest to-night with you."
Felicia Warren turned her great eyes with a sort of wonder to him.
They rested on him with a tenderness that he could not long have borne.
"You must not remain unmarried," he said, "you must not."
Without answering him she went slowly over to her little desk. She
wrote a few seconds there and came back and handed to him a little slip
of paper.
"When the telegraph office opens to-day, will you send this dispatch
for me? It will fetch Prince Pollona to me no matter where he may be.
I have asked him to meet me in Paris and I will take the morning train
from here myself."
She turned to the table on which his money lay and taking a roll of
notes said, "I will pay up everything I owe here. I think I have given
you every proof, every proof."
Bulstrode made no advance towards her. He saw how she struggled with
her emotion. He let her get herself in hand. Finally, with more
composure, she spoke again:
"I play next month in London. Will you come to see me play?"
"Oh, many times."
"No," Felicia Warren murmured, "only once, and after that I shall never
see you again."
He would have protested, but she repeated, "never again," with such
intensity that he bowed his head and he found that her decision brought
a pang whose sharpness he wondered would last how long.
He had started, with her last words, toward the door and she followed
him over to it. There, detaining him by her hand, she asked softly:
"Does she, too, love you as much as this?"
Bulstrode hesitated; then said, "I do not know."
"Not know?" cried the girl, "you don't know?"
It was with the greatest difficulty that Bulstrode could at any time
bring to his lips even the name of the woman he loved. At this moment
the vision of her as he had seen her lately on her husband's arm going
in under the pavilion of the hotel crossed his mind with a cruel
despair and cruel disgust. A sense of his solitude, of his defrauded
life, rushed over him as he looked into the eyes of this woman who
loved him.
"No," he said intensely, "I do not know, I do not know. I have a code
of honor a million years old, but I live up to it. She is a wife, I
have never told her
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