Geoffrey smiled. “I hadn’t noticed them.” He watched her as she stooped to pick the fragile white and green from the wet, black ground.
Her lovely, blighted face, pallid, wasted, looked among all the golden shimmer of the woods like death in the midst of life. A horrible fear went through him as she sat there, putting the snowdrops together, stem by stem. He had discovered his own former ignorance of life, of what feeling did to one. Could people die of disappointed love? With all his cynical knowledge of the world he found himself here, face to face with this broken-hearted love, a mere frightened boy, as ignorant as any boy of the life of feeling he had entered, groping, perplexed and astonished in his fear and adoration. Yet his man’s training availed him. He could have cast himself upon his knees, imploring her to live, to love him; at all events not to torture him by suffering; but above this immature aspect of his new self he kept all his air of resolute calm.
She had made a little nosegay of her flowers, winding a long grass around their stems, and now, turning to him, faintly smiling, she held them to him. “Will you have them?”
For a moment he held the hand and bent his head over it and the snowdrops. She felt the kiss among the flowers.
“I shall always think of you when I see them,” she said, looking away from him. “And you, when you remember to-day, don’t let it be a memory only of sadness; but of my gratitude—my wondering gratitude.” She paused, and as he made no reply, added gently, “I never dreamed you cared for me.”
“It came slowly—the knowledge that without you the world would be empty,” said Geoffrey.
“And is it empty now?”
“Oh, no,” he answered, raising his eyes to her; “you are here.”
Tremulously, afraid of hurting him, yet the longing to find comfort for him—for herself—urging her, she asked, “But does loving me—knowing how deeply you have made me care for you—does that keep the pain from being too great?”
Geoffrey again had his half smile. “Ah, if I don’t talk about it, you mustn’t think it’s not great. It would be less, too, if you were not so miserable.”