Here his voice broke a little, and he unclasped his hands.  She raised her head defiantly now, and flashed back at him: 

“I understand you had admitted to being a dog in the manger—­you were always an animal of sorts!”

This told, he grew paler, and into his blue eyes there came a look of pain.

“You have a perfect right to say that to me if you choose; it is probably true.  I am a very strong man with tremendous passions which have always been in my race; but I am not altogether a brute—­because, although I want you myself with more intensity than I have ever wanted anything in my life—­I am going to give you up to Henry.  I have been through hell—­ever since I came from France.  I have been weak, too, and could not face the final wrench—­but I am determined at last to do what is straight, and to-morrow I will instruct my lawyers to begin proceedings, and I suppose in two months or less you will be free.”

Sabine grew white and cold—­her voice was hardly audible as she asked, looking up at him: 

“What made you come here to-night?”

He took a step nearer to her, while he reclasped his hands, as though he feared that he might be tempted to touch her.

“I came—­because I wanted to see you so that I could not stay away—­I came because I wished to convince myself again that you loved Henry, so that there could be no shadow of uncertainty in what I intended to do.”

“Well?”

“I saw that, whether you love him or not, you desire that I shall think that you do—­and so at dinner I played for my own pleasure, the die being cast, for something else had occurred before dinner which makes it of no consequence to my decision whether you do or do not love him now.  It is Henry’s great love for you which is the factor, because to part from you he says would end his life.  I could not commit the frightful cruelty and dishonor of upsetting his plans, since you are originally to blame for concealing the truth from him, and I am to blame for abetting you.  He trusts us both as you said.”

Sabine was trembling; her whole fabric of peace and happiness in the future seemed to be falling to pieces like a pack of cards.

She could only look at Michael with piteous violet eyes out of which all the defiance had gone.  Her slender figure swayed a little, and she leaned against the mantelpiece.

“My God!” he said, with a fresh clenching of his strong hands, “I would not have believed I could have suffered so.  As it is the last time we shall ever talk to one another perhaps—­I want you to know about things—­to hear it all.  I would like to ask you again to forgive me for long ago, but I suppose you feel that is past forgiveness?” His face had a look of pleading; then he went on as she did not respond.  “If you had not left me, I would soon have made you forget that you had been angry, as I thought indeed I had already done when you seemed to be contented at least in my arms.  But I would have caressed you into complete forgetfulness in time—­” here his voice vibrated with a deep note of tenderness, which thrilled her—­but yet she could not speak.