“Ah, no! Don’t!” I cried out, stung. “Not that sort of thing.”
“Quite right,” he broke in promptly, but still quietly. A second’s pause, then—
“There would be no excuse for snatching at you like that, Nancy, if there weren’t a reason. And the reason, if you really haven’t guessed it, is, as it happens——”
Once before, that day, three words from him had made a series of situations crumble away and become as though they’d never been. Once again a whole set of relations—that between a typist and the head of the firm; that between a paid official fiancée and her employer; that between a man and a girl who played that drawn game of platonic friendship; that other between two who quarrelled and fenced and misunderstood and hurt each other and themselves so cruelly—was brushed aside by another three words.
Billy Waters, still standing there and looking down gravely at me, said very simply, “I love you.”
What could I say? I was too dazed. I gasped, as when at Porth Cariad I waded out for a swim, and a racing wave met me and dashed above my breast, catching my breath. Sentences formed themselves and died away before I opened my lips.
“You can’t mean——” “Then why——” “A mistake——” “This is the first gleam I’ve had that you——” “If it’s because you’re sorry——” Then, of them all, I could catch firmly at only one thought. I said breathlessly, holding the arm of the chair, “But that girl——”
“Won’t you understand? I never gave her a thought of that sort, or she me,” he declared rapidly, “except about how we were to get out of it. If you only knew, that unfortunate French child and I had as much ado to keep from getting married as some couples have to pull it off! I tell you she and that young Lenoir—man who’s just beaten the record for upside-down flying—were—but it’s not their affair I’m bothering about just now—it’s——”
“But she was so pretty!—so much smarter—she——”
“She was quicker than you! She spotted, that day at tea in the cottage, how her plan for me of an official fiancée was working out.”