"Now, there," she said, with a little smile, "I think you might have changed your tense."
"But I was talking of two years ago, before—— Well, you see, I thought of you, then, as just an unattached angel from South Africa."
"And now you have learned that my angelic qualities never existed outside your imagination. Ah, Dick, your explanations make matters much worse."
"But, no; I didn't say you were the less an angel; only that I thought of you as unattached, then—you see."
Constance looked down at her paper, and a silence fell between us. The silence was intolerable to me. I was standing beside her chair, and I cannot explain just what I felt in looking down at her. I know that the very outline of her figure and the loose hair of her head seemed at once intimately familiar and inexpressibly sacred and beautiful to me. Looking down upon them caused a kind of mist to rise before my eyes. It was as though I feared to lose possession of my faculties. That must end, I felt, or an end would come to all reserve and loyalty to John Crondall. And yet—yet something in the curve of her cheek—she was looking down—held me, drew me out of myself, as it might be into a tranced state in which a man is moved to contempt of all risks.
"Dear, I loved you, even then," I said; "but then I thought you free."
"So I was." She did not look at me, and her voice was very low; but there was some quality in it which thrilled me through and through, as I stood at her side.
"But now, of course, I know—— But why have you never told me, Constance?"
"I am just as free now as then, Dick."
"Why, Constance! But, John Crondall?"