“Forgiven you, darling? Why—is not the result a very triumph to me? I knew that it was the moment we first looked at each other.”
“Did you? From your side I was not so confident then. But I see you now as you first came into the room—that bright, laughing glance meeting mine, without an atom of gêne or self-consciousness. And then—later. We did not have to say much:—we knew that we belonged to each other. Didn’t we?”
“We did. We did indeed. Sweetheart, will you be very angry with me if I say something that has been on my mind?”
“How can you use that word as between you and me?”
“Well, then—” she went on, strangely hesitatingly for her. “Even if you had to part with Seven Kloofs, and there’s no doubt, I’m afraid, that it’ll be no good for years—you might get a place you liked just as well I have a little of my own, remember—not much, but all my own—and that, with what you would save from the wreck, would surely be enough to—to set us up again.”
She spoke quickly, hurriedly, deprecatingly, as she noted the grave, disapproving look which deepened upon his face in the brilliant moonlight.
“No—no. Lalanté, love, never that. No. Once you hinted that way before—but—no, that could not be.”
“Now you hurt me.”
“Hurt you—hurt you? Child, if you only knew how I am adoring you at this moment, if possible—I say if possible—more than ever I have done before. Hurt you? You?”
“Now, forgive me. It is I who am hurting you.” And her voice quivered in its tenderness of passion as she reached out her hand to him—they were walking their horses now. “But I thought if two people belonged to each other they had everything in common.”