The position was intolerable. In happy circumstances,
Christine's marriage with Ferrol might have been a completion of their
glory, but in reality it was the last blow to their progress.
In the dusk, Ferrol and Christine sat in his room: she, defiant,
indignant, courageous; he hiding his real feelings, and knowing that all
she now planned and arranged would come to naught. Three times that day
he had had violent paroxysms of coughing; and at last had thrown himself
on his bed, exhausted, helplessly wishing that something would end it
all. Illusion had passed for ever. He no longer had a cold, but a
mortal trouble that was killing him inch by inch. He remembered how a
brother officer of his, dying of an incurable disease, and abhorring
suicide, had gone into a cafe and slapped an unoffending bully and
duellist in the face, inviting a combat. The end was sure, easy and
honourable. For himself--he looked at Christine. Not all her abounding
vitality, her warm, healthy body, or her overwhelming love, could give
him one extra day of life, not one day. What a fool he had been to think
that she could do so! And she must sit and watch him--she, with her
primitive fierceness of love, must watch him sinking, fading helplessly
out of life, sight and being.
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