Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Awful to be talking here?” he repeated.

“Don’t look that way!” she cried miserably. “I can’t bear to hurt you so. You have children, too, to think of—you said you had a son.”

“A son.” The fact seemed so far away that he looked at her, startled. “Oh, yes, I have a son.”

A sort of craziness, a wild illogic in the situation had communicated itself to him; and yet he fought blindly against it as he felt his own mood of ecstasy slipping away. For twenty hours he had recaptured the power of seeing things through a mist of hope—hope in some vague, happy destiny that lay just over the hill—and now with every word she uttered the mist was passing, the hope, the town, the memory, the very face of this woman before his eyes.

“Never again in this world,” he cried with a last despairing effort, “will you and I have a chance at happiness!”

But he knew, even as he said this, that it had never been a chance; simply a wild, desperate sortie from two long-beleaguered fortresses by night.

He looked up to see that George Harland had turned in at the gate.