Since all preparations had been made, why not marry at once?
"My fortune, my name, Anna, the chaste love that will be left to you from me when--when I shall be gone." He wanted to transform his caress--too light, alas--into a lasting benefit for the vague future.

For the present all he aspired to was the feeble and fictitious union implied in the word marriage.
"Why speak of it ?" she said, instead of giving a direct answer, feeling an almost insurmountable repugnance, doubtless because of her love for Michel, which the sick man had declared in her stead.

While she had consented in principle to marrying him and had allowed the preliminary steps to be taken, she had never replied definitely to his urgings.
But it looked to me as if she were about to make a different decision, one contrary to her material interests, in all the purity of her soul, which was so transparent--the decision to give herself to him freely.
"Tell me!" he murmured.
There was almost a smile on her mouth, the mouth to which supplications had been offered as to an altar.
The dying man, feeling that she was about to accept, murmured: "I love life." He shook his head.

"I have so little time left, so little time that I do not want to sleep at night any more." Then he paused and waited for her to speak.
"Yes," she said, and lightly touched--hardly grazed--the old man's hand with her own.
And in spite of myself, my inexorable, attentive eye could not help detecting the stamp of theatrical solemnity, of conscious grandeur in her gesture.

Even though devoted and chaste, without any ulterior motive, her sacrifice had a self-glorifying pride, which I perceived--I who saw everything.
.