"Really, really?" She grew grave. "Harry, dear, for pity's sake tell me if you love me!"
"Haven't I told you?" he cried gayly. "Where are the poets? Oh, for some good quotations! I'm infernally unpoetical, I know. Is this it—that you're always before my eyes, always in my head, that you're
terribly in the way, that when I've got anything worth thinking I think it to you, anything worth doing I do it for you, anything good to say I say it to you? Is this it, that I curse myself and curse you? Is this it, that I know myself only as your lover and that if I'm not that, then I seem nothing at all? I've never been in love before, but all that sounds rather like it."
"And you'll take Blent from me?"
"Yes, as the climax of all, I'll take Blent from you."
To her it seemed the climax, the thing she found hardest to believe, the best evidence for the truth of those extravagant words which sounded so sweet in her ears. Harry saw this, but he held on his way. Nay, now he himself forgot his trick, and could still have gone on had there been none, had he in truth been accepting Blent from her hands. Even at the price of pride he would have had her now.
She rose suddenly, and began to walk to and fro across the end of the room, while he stood by the table watching her.
"Well, isn't it time you said something to me?" he suggested with a smile.
"Give me time, Harry, give me time. The world's all changed to-night. You—yes, you came suddenly out of the darkness of the night"—she waved her hand toward the window—"and changed the world for me. How am I to believe it? And if I can believe it, what can I say? Let me alone for a minute, Harry dear."
He was well content to wait and watch. All time seemed before them, and how better could he fill it? He seemed himself to suffer in this hour a joyful transformation; to know better why men lived and loved to live, to reach out to the full strength and the full