'You would not be happy.'
'What has happiness to do with it?' she asked with an astonishing
young bitterness.
'Ah, if you feel like that,' he said, 'if you feel as I do about you,
if nothing he does and nothing he says--'
'He says very little,' Henrietta interrupted gloomily, but Charles
seemed not to hear.
'If his actions are only like the wind in the trees, fluttering the
leaves--yes, I suppose that's love. The tree remains.'
She dropped her face into her hands. 'You're making me miserable,' she
cried.
He removed her hands and held them firmly. 'But why?'
'I don't know,' she swayed towards him, but he kept her arms rigid,
like a bar between them, 'but I don't want to lose you.'
'You can't,' he assured her.
'And though you think you have me in your heart, the me that doesn't
change, you'd like the other one too, wouldn't you? I mean, you'd
really like to hold me? Not just the thought of me? Tell me you love
me in that way too.'
'Yes,' he said, 'I love you in that way too, but I tell you it doesn't
matter.' He dropped her hands as though he had no more strength.
'Marry your Francis Sales. You still belong to me.'
'But will you belong to me?' she asked softly. She could not lose him,
she wanted to have them both, and Charles, perhaps unwisely, perhaps
from the depth of his wisdom, which was truth, answered quietly, 'I
belonged to you since the first day I saw you.'
She let out a sigh of inexpressible relief.
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