"You don't speak like a Frenchwoman," he ventured.
"I am not. You know that. I am an American."
"Yes; but you have lived in France."
"Always, since I was twelve. But I have known plenty of English,—Americans, too. Shall I speak to you in French?"
He deprecated it, with hands outspread.
"No, no. I read it, by myself. I couldn't understand it, spoken."
She was smiling at him radiantly, and with the innocent purpose, even he, in his ecstasy, felt, of making herself more beautiful and more kind.
"Now," she was saying, "since we have met, you'll come to the house? You won't let me stand in the way?"
His tongue was dry in his mouth. He felt the beauty of her, the pang of seeing anything so sweet and having only the memory of it. Great instincts surged up in him with longings that were only pain. They seemed to embrace all things, the primal founts of life, the loyalties, devotions, hopes, and tragedies. At last he understood, not with his pulses only, but his soul. And all the time he had not answered her. She was still looking at him, smiling kindly now, and, he believed, not cognizant of the terror in his heart, not advertising her beauty as at first he had supposed. She seemed a friend home from long absence. He was speaking, and his voice, in his effort, sounded to him reassuringly gentle.
"We'll see."