’But it is true.  The revolver is in my pocket.  Ah!  I have made you cry!  You’re frightened!  But I’m not a brute; I’m only a little beside myself.  Pardon me, angel!’

He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour.  He did not understand me.  He did not suspect the risk he had run.  If I had hesitated to surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should never have surrendered.  I knew myself well enough to know that.  I had a conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic.  A threat would have parted us, perhaps for ever.  Oh, the blindness of man!  But I forgave him.  Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.

‘Carlotta,’ he said, ’we shall leave everything.  You grasp it?—­everything.’

‘Yes,’ I replied.  ’Of all the things we have now, we shall have nothing but ourselves.’

’If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see you again.’

Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me!  He meant what he said.

‘It is no sacrifice for me,’ I murmured.  ’The sacrifice would be not to give up all in exchange for you.’

‘We shall be exiles,’ he went on, ’until the divorce business is over.  And then perhaps we shall creep back—­shall we?—­and try to find out how many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.’

‘Yes,’ I said.  ‘We shall come back.  They all do.’

‘What do you mean?’ he demanded.

‘Thousands have done what we are going to do,’ I said.  ’And all of them have thought that their own case was different from the other cases.’

‘Ah!’

’And a few have been happy.  A few have not regretted the price.  A few have retained the illusion.’

‘Illusion?  Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?’

I could see that my heart’s treasure was ruffled.  He clasped my hand tenaciously.

‘I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen,’ I answered quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous passion.  ’In me there are two beings—­myself and the observer of myself.  It is the novelist’s disease, this duplication of personality.  When I said illusion, I meant the supreme illusion of love.  Is it not an illusion?  I have seen it in others, and in exactly the same way I see it in myself and I see it in you.  Will it last?—­who knows?  None can tell.’

‘Angel!’ he expostulated.

‘No one can foresee the end of love,’ I said, with an exquisite gentle sorrow.  ’But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of disillusion which it will cost.  Darling, this precious night alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life.’

He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and his disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely round my neck.