A moment's silence; and then—"Why not?"
Jem glanced up, hardly able to believe his own ears. Below the surface, he was tempest-tossed; long pent-up forces surging in billows like those grey heights around. A dazzle of light filled the murky air, and everything was pulsating with a new vividness of life and hope. He grew excessively pale; yet he spoke with restrained utterance:
"Because it would be asking you to give up everything—in exchange for nothing!"
"But if I do not value the 'everything'? And if that 'nothing' is perhaps 'something' to me?"
"You must understand! I have only my stipend—and my mother to support. Don't you see?" asked Jem, with less composure.
The throb of the silent engines seemed to have passed into his brain; and he scarcely knew what he said under this strange clang of sound and brightness of light, through which he heard Evelyn's low tones, inaudible to everybody else, and saw her sweet face, fair still to him as in all the freshness of her lovely girlhood; while the rush of wind and water faded into nothingness.
"I did not mean to say this! I hardly know why—except—The thing cannot be—ought not to be! . . . Still—if we should not get through—or if you are saved, and not I—then I should like you to know that I have loved you for years—have loved you always. I have never loved any other—since the day that I first saw you, coming over the stepping-stones!"
"So long ago! All those years!" said Evelyn.
A bright rose-colour flushed her cheeks, and the deep blue eyes, looked up at Jem, had lost their unsatisfied craving.
"And I thought you almost despised me—looked down on what seemed to you my butterfly life."