He looked at her without moving, though it was in his heart to kneel before her and, taking her hands in his own, pour out the tale of his love to her. His heart whispered to him that she would at that moment give him kiss for kiss. A month ago no power would have restrained him from kneeling to her; but now he was under the control of another power and a stronger than that which set his heart beating as it was beating. He felt the controlling influence; but--well, he thought it would not be wise to look at her any longer.
He turned away from where she was sitting; his hands were behind him and his fingers locked together. He stood looking out of the window, but seeing nothing. The room was very silent. He thought he heard a movement behind him. He thought he heard her footfalls approaching him, he thought he heard a sigh close to him--a sigh with the inflection of a sob; but still he did not move--his fingers tightened about each other. He would not turn round. His heart beat more wildly, and the rhythm of its beats made up a siren-song hard to be resisted.
But there was another power upholding him in the struggle to which he had nerved himself, and he knew that that power was love. He felt that it was his love for her that saved him--that saved her. He did not turn round.
In another moment he was kneeling beside the chair in which she had sat, kissing the place where her hand had rested. It was still warm from her touch, and he kissed it again and again, crying in a voice tremulous not with passion, but with love:
"My beloved! my beloved! You have been true--true to true love--true to the truest love!"
With what story was he to go to her? What excuse was he to make for interfering between her and the carrying out of her whims? How was he to tell her that she was no longer to make a fool of the youth whom she had taken a fancy to fool?
He found no answer to any of these questions which he asked himself. But when he went on to ask himself if she would not have a right to accuse him of impudence and presumption were he to go to her for the purpose of remonstrating with her, he had no difficulty in finding an answer.
He had never set about any business for which he had less aptitude than this. He was sufficiently a man of the world to know that he was the last person who should go to Mrs. Abington to remonstrate with her. The man who interposes in a quarrel between a man and a wife is accounted a fool; but a man who interposes between an actress and her lover is much worse--he is a busybody, and he usually comes off as badly as does an arbitrator, who reconciles two of his friends in order to become the enemy of both.