“Oh my dearest

“Oh my dearest. My dearest. My sweetest angel . . . Sarah, Sarah ... oh Sarah.”
A few moments later he lay still. Precisely ninety seconds had passed since he had left her to look into the bedroom.
Chapter 47
Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern
From her false friend’s approach in Hades turn,
Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.
—Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853)


Silence.
They lay as if paralyzed by what they had done. Congealed in sin, frozen with delight. Charles—no gentle postcoital sadness for him, but an immediate and universal horror—was like a city struck out of a quiet sky by an atom bomb. All lay razed; all principle, all future, all faith, all honorable intent. Yet he survived, he lay in the sweetest possession of his life, the last man alive, infinitely isolated . . . but already the radioactivity of guilt crept, crept through his nerves and veins. In the distant shadows Ernestina stood and stared mournfully at him. Mr. Freeman struck him across the face ... how stone they were, rightly implacable, immovably waiting.
He shifted a little to relieve Sarah of his weight, then turned on his back so that she could lie against him, her head on his shoulder. He stared up at the ceiling. What a mess, what an inutterable mess!
And he held her a little closer. Her hand reached timidly and embraced his. The rain stopped. Heavy footsteps, slow, measured, passed somewhere beneath the window. A police officer, perhaps. The Law.
Charles said, “I am worse than Varguennes.” Her only answer was to press his hand, as if to deny and hush him. But he was a man.
“What is to become of us?”
“I cannot think beyond this hour.”
Again he pressed her shoulders, kissed her forehead; then stared again at the ceiling. She was so young now, so over-whelmed,fake montblanc pens.
“I must break my engagement.”
“I ask nothing of you. I cannot. I am to blame,fake uggs boots.”
“You warned me, you warned me. I am wholly to blame. I knew when I came here ... I chose to be blind. I put all my obligations behind me.”
She murmured, “I wished it so.” She said it again, sadly. “I wished it so.”
For a while he stroked her hair. It fell over her shoulder, her face, veiling her.
“Sarah ... it is the sweetest name.”
She did not answer. A minute passed, his hand smoothing her hair, as if she were a child. But his mind was elsewhere. As if she sensed it, she at last spoke.
“I know you cannot marry me.”
“I must. I wish to. I could never look myself in the face again if I did not.”
“I have been wicked. I have long imagined such a day as this. I am not fit to be your wife,LINK.”
“My dearest—“
“Your position in the world, your friends, your . . . and she—I know she must love you. How should I not know what she feels?”
“But I no longer love her!”
She let his vehemence drain into the silence.
“She is worthy of you. I am not,nike shox torch 2.”
At last he began to take her at her word. He made her turn her head and they looked, in the dim outside light, into each other’s penumbral eyes. His were full of a kind of horror; and hers were calm, faintly smiling.
“You cannot mean I should go away—as if nothing had happened between us?”