Free The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

And why had she written to him? …
    Perros was reached at last. Raoul walked into the smoky sitting-room of the Setting Sun and at once saw Christine standing before him, smiling and showing no astonishment.
    “So you have come,” she said. “I felt that I should find you here, when I came back from mass. Some one told me so, at the church.”
    “Who?” asked Raoul, taking her little hand in his.
    “Why, my poor father, who is dead.”
    There was a silence; and then Raoul asked:
    “Did your father tell you that I love you, Christine, and that I can not live without you?”
    Christine blushed to the eyes and turned away her head. In a trembling voice, she said:
    “Me? You are dreaming, my friend!”
    And she burst out laughing, to put herself in countenance.
    “Don’t laugh, Christine; I am quite serious,” Raoul answered.
    And she replied gravely: “I did not make you come to tell me such things as that.”
    “You ‘made me come,’ Christine; you knew that your letter would not leave me indignant and that I should hasten to Perros. How can you have thought that, if you did not think I loved you?”
    “I thought you would remember our games here, as children, in which my father so often joined. I really don’t know what I thought … Perhaps I was wrong to write to you … This anniversary and your sudden appearance in my room at the Opera, the other evening, reminded me of the time long past and made me write to you as the little girl that I then was …”
    There was something in Christine’s attitude that seemed to Raoul not natural. He did not feel any hostility in her; far from it: the distressed affection shining in her eyes told him that. But why was this affection distressed? That was what he wished to know and what was irritating him.
    “When you saw me in your dressing-room, was that the first time you noticed me, Christine?”
    She was incapable of lying.
    “No,” she said, “I had seen you several times in your brother’s box. And also on the stage.”
    “I thought so!” said Raoul, compressing his lips. “But then why, when you saw me in your room, at your feet, reminding you that I had rescued your scarf from the sea, why did you answer as though you did not know me and also why did you laugh?”
    The tone of these questions was so rough that Christine stared at Raoul without replying. The young man himself was aghast at the sudden quarrel which he had dared to raise at the very moment when he had resolved to speak words of gentleness, love and submission to Christine. A husband, a lover with all rights, would talk no differently to a wife, a mistress who had offended him. But he had gone too far and saw no other way out of the ridiculous position than to behave odiously.
    “You don’t answer!” he said angrily and unhappily. “Well, I will answer for you. It was because there was some one in the room who was in your way, Christine, some one that you did not wish to know that you could be interested in any one else!”
    “If any one was in my way, my friend,” Christine broke in coldly, “if any one was in my way, that evening, it was yourself, since I told you to leave the room!”
    “Yes, so that you might remain with the other!”
    “What are you saying, monsieur?” asked the girl excitedly. “And to what other do you refer?”
    “To the man to whom you said, ‘I sing only for you! … to-night I gave you my soul and I am dead!’”
    Christine seized Raoul’s arm and clutched it with a strength which no one would have suspected in so frail a creature.
    “Then you were listening behind the door?”
    “Yes, because I love you everything … And I heard everything …”
    “You heard what?”
    And the young girl, becoming strangely calm, released Raoul’s arm.
    “He said to you, ‘Christine, you must love me!’”
    At these words, a deathly pallor spread over Christine’s face, dark rings formed round her eyes, she staggered and seemed on the point of swooning.