‘You will not trust me?’ he asked again, this time with a dull accent of humility that might not have missed an older heart.

‘I cannot’, she replied rebelliously.

He met the dark, unyielding eyes, to find they stated an unyielding fact.

The woman who compelled it could not hear his answer; she would have understood it.

‘And I,’ he said simply, with a regret that reached beyond the passion of the moment, ‘I cannot stay.’