After some seconds the woman's
voice resumed--
"Ah! all men are cowards. Well, I will tell you. Your question
implied yet another, and it was, Do I, hating my husband, love you?"
"Geraldine!"
"Do you still wish that question answered? I will do you that favour
also: Listen: for the life of me--I don't know."
And the speaker laughed--a laugh full of amused tolerance, as though
her confession had left her a careless spectator of its results.
Mr. Fogo shuddered.
"In heaven's name, Geraldine, don't mock me!"
"But it is true. How _should_ I know? You have talked to me, read me
your verses--and, indeed, I think them very beautiful. You have with
comparative propriety, because in verse, invited me to fly with thee
to a desolate isle in the Southern Sea--wherever that is--and
forgetting my shame and likewise blame, while you do the same with
name and fame and its laurel-leaf, go to moral grief on a coral
reef--"
"Geraldine, you are torturing me."
"Do I not quote correctly? My point is this:--A woman will listen to
talk, but she admires action. Prove that you are ready, not to fly
to a coral reef, but to do me one small service, and you may have
another answer."
"Name it."
Mr. Fogo, peering through the bushes as one fascinated, saw an
extremely beautiful woman confronting an extremely pale youth, and
fancied also that he saw a curious flash of contempt pass over the
woman's features as she answered--
"Really unless you kill the Admiral next time he makes a pun, I do
not know that just now I need such a service.
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