“Yes; but had you been very fortunate, very happy, I should still have looked for you.”
“But why? Did you like my face so much?”
“So much. I felt that I should have known you long ago, and that, having missed you for so long through the stupid accident of the years, I must know you always in the future. I should have felt it had you been dead.” His charming eyes dwelling on her with a perfect candor and simplicity, for it was easy at last to speak these familiar thoughts to her, he added: “I needed you; I had always needed you. And so, it seemed to me, you needed me; your eyes in the photograph called to me.”
At this she looked swiftly at him with an astonishment that slowly softened to a smile. “You are a strange, a good friend,” she said.
“You accept me as such?”
“Ah, yes,” she replied, “I accept you as such—gratefully. I don’t call you. Those days are over.”
She rose, pushing the harp aside, and walked slowly down the room, pausing at the window and looking out. He divined that she was much touched, even that there were tears in her eyes. He feared to show her the depths of his feeling for her, his longing to enter her life, help her, if it might be, in it; but, rising too, he said in a slightly trembling voice: “You don’t need my friendship, but I need yours. Let that be my claim.”
“Your claim to what?” she asked, her face still turned from him.
“To the hope that I may grow into your confidence—the hope that you will lean on me, trust me completely, and that, with time, I may, perhaps, mean something to you of what you mean to me.”
Her face now, as she looked at him, showed a curious, a vivid look of wonder, humor, tenderness, and sadness.