And I was to let you go, never to meet
again on this side of eternity? It was not possible, and as you were
so clumsy, or so timid, or so self-torturing--"
She finished the sentence with a long kiss, at which he closed his
eyes once more, and shut out everything but its flame.
Was it calculation, was it her natural instinct?--suffice it to say
that Pilar never by any chance alluded in their conversations to her
past. She was fond of talking, and talked a great deal, and her
conversation was always startling, original and vivacious; her power
of imagination as lively as her sparkling eyes, springing from the
nearest object to the furthest, from the ordinary to the sublime,
but never one word escaped her which might remind Wilhelm that she
had gone through confessed and unconfessed experiences of every
kind, and reached the turning-point of her existence without him.
Her life, it would appear, had only begun with the moment at which
he had risen upon her horizon. What went before that was torn out of
the book of memory--one scarcely noticed the gaps where the pages
were missing. She did all she could to make him forget that she was
a stranger to him, and to strengthen in him the delusion that she
belonged to him, that she was one with him, that it had always been
so.
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