'Yes, yes,' she murmured, 'I am sorry.' After a moment she added: 'Now that he's dead I'll make a confession, Jim, that I have never made to a soul. If he had pressed me--which he did not--to go with him when I was in the carriage that night beside his yacht, I would have gone. And I was disappointed that he did not press me.'
'Suppose he were to suddenly appear now, and say in a voice of command, "Margery, come with me!"'
'I believe I should have no power to disobey,' she returned, with a mischievous look. 'He was like a magician to me. I think he was one. He could move me as a loadstone moves a speck of steel . . .
Yet no,' she added, hearing the infant cry, 'he would not move me now. It would be so unfair to baby.'
'Well,' said Jim, with no great concern (for 'la jalousie retrospective,' as George Sand calls it, had nearly died out of him), 'however he might move 'ee, my love, he'll never come. He swore it to me: and he was a man of his word.'
Midsummer, 1883.