“Do you know that I care, deeply, that you should be sad?”
“I know how kind you are,” she said, feeling herself at a loss before the difference in voice and look. “So much kinder,” she urged herself on to say, grasping at her old rallying attitude, “than I had ever suspected you of being. Do you know, I didn’t imagine when I first met you that you were very kind. But don’t bother about my sadness. It’s of no importance.”
Under his eyes her lightness was lamentably out of tune. She paused with the sense of graceless discord.
“You don’t at all know why I have come to-day, do you?” he said. A tremor was in his voice, his look; the tremor, not of weakness, but of intense strength nerving itself. His beautiful face against the clear spring sky was white. He was not appealing; she felt in a moment that he would never appeal; but all the Olympian had suddenly become human and humanly shaken in its strength.
In a flash of deep astonishment she knew why he had come, and in her startled, gazing eyes he read her recognition.
“You see—you see—what I have come to ask. Wait—don’t answer. I don’t want to ask you anything yet. I want to tell you that you have changed all my life. I don’t mean that I care less about the things I have cared for. I care more, only differently.
“From the first, I felt you, hardly knowing what it was; you made me feel things I had hardly believed in. I came back to you, hardly knowing why I came, and then knowing that I loved you. Wait; let me say all this: it’s like breathing after stifling to tell you. Yes, it’s like light and air; you mean that to me. If you were my wife I could make life great—for you—with you. It would be a new world with you beside me. Wait, don’t speak—I see that I hurt you. You don’t care about me—yet. Unless there is somebody else, you shall care. But I want you to see, and believe that whether you love me or not, I shall always be there. As long as I live I shall be there. You must always call upon me. You must always trust me.”
He had spoken quickly, yet with a steadiness that had pushed aside the protests of her wonder, her gratitude, her pain. And even in the pause where he drew the long breath of his full avowal, his eyes on hers held her to silence.
“Now, will you tell me where I stand with you?” he said.
“What can I say,” she faltered. “You are so beautiful to me; I see it all—I believe it all. I can only hurt you.”