She stopped with an air of interrogation.
Ramage looked at her for a long and discriminating interval without speaking. He seemed to be hesitating between two courses of action. "I don't know much about the technique of music," he said at last, with his eyes upon her. "It's a matter of feeling with me."
He contradicted himself by plunging into an exposition of motifs.
By a tacit agreement they ignored the significant thing between them, ignored the slipping away of the ground on which they had stood together hitherto....
All through the love music of the second act, until the hunting horns of Mark break in upon the dream, Ann Veronica's consciousness was flooded with the perception of a man close beside her, preparing some new thing to say to her, preparing, perhaps, to touch her, stretching hungry invisible tentacles about her. She tried to think what she should do in this eventuality or that. Her mind had been and was full of the thought of Capes, a huge generalized Capes-lover. And in some incomprehensible way, Ramage was confused with Capes; she had a grotesque disposition to persuade herself that this was really Capes who surrounded her, as it were, with wings of desire. The fact that it was her trusted friend making illicit love to her remained, in spite of all her effort, an insignificant thing in her mind. The music confused and distracted her, and made her struggle against a feeling of intoxication. Her head swam. That was the inconvenience of it; her head was swimming. The music throbbed into the warnings that preceded the king's irruption.
Abruptly he gripped her wrist. "I love you, Ann Veronica. I love you--with all my heart and soul."
She put her face closer to his. She felt the warm nearness of his. "DON'T!" she said, and wrenched her wrist from his retaining hand.
"My God! Ann Veronica," he said, struggling to keep his hold upon her; "my God! Tell me--tell me now--tell me you love me!"
His expression was as it were rapaciously furtive. She answered in whispers, for there was the white arm of a woman in the next box peeping beyond the partition within a yard of him.
"My hand! This isn't the place."
He released her hand and talked in eager undertones against an auditory background of urgency and distress.
"Ann Veronica," he said, "I tell you this is love. I love the soles of your feet. I love your very breath. I have tried not to tell you--tried to be simply your friend. It is no good. I want you. I worship you. I would do anything--I would give anything to make you mine.... Do you hear me? Do you hear what I am saying?... Love!"