"But
I came to say--you have had one happy day. Wholly happy, have you not,
poor little Bebee?"
"Ah, yes!" she sighed rather than said the answer in her wondrous
gladness; drawn there close to him, with the softness of his lips upon
her. Could he have come back only to ask that?
"Well, that is something. You will remember it always, Bebee?" he
murmured in his unconscious cruelty. "I did not wish to spoil your
cloudless pleasure, dear--for you care for me a little, do you not?--so I
came back to tell you only now, that I go away for a little while
to-morrow."
"Go away!"
She trembled in his arms and turned cold as ice; a great terror and
darkness fell upon her; she had never thought that he would ever go
away. He caressed her, and played with her as a boy may with a bird
before he wrings its neck.
"You will come back?"
He kissed her: "Surely."
"To-morrow?"
"Nay--not so soon."
"In a week?"
"Hardly."
"In a month, then?"
"Perhaps."
"Before winter, anyway?"
He looked aside from the beseeching, tearful, candid eyes, and kissed her
hair and her throat, and said, "Yes, dear--beyond a doubt.
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