“Yes,” she said softly. “She does.”
He looked at her with a little ache in his throat. The moonlight was full on her partly averted face; her profile, clear-cut, delicate, was like a medallion.
“Pen—could you love me?”
The words seemed wrung from him in spite of an apparent determination not to utter them.
She turned and looked straight into his eyes.
“That isn’t what you should ask me, unless, you—”
“I do,” he said passionately.
“No; frankly, I didn’t want to; but I did—I do.”
“Why?” she asked curiously, watching the fine little lines about his eyes deepen.