She sank down again slowly, reluctantly, as it seemed, and he threw himself beside her, bending forward, his eyes fixed upon her face, all alight with the ardent desire to turn aside her anger, to melt her coldness.
“Why did you write that note?” she said.
“Why—I was mad!” he said. “Stop—I was mad; I wrote it while I was in the theatre. It was wrong, I know, of course; but I’m not sorry that I wrote it!”
She turned her eyes with surprise and reproach upon him.
“No, I’m not sorry!” he said, almost defiantly. “I wrote it during the entr’acte; I’d been watching you and listening to you until—well, until I had lost myself, I suppose. Anyhow, I got the piece of paper and wrote on it, and put it among the violets, all in a moment, as it were. I felt that I must see you again—wait, ah, wait and hear me out!” for she had made a movement that seemed to threaten her departure. “I don’t know how long I may be here; I may go at any moment—from Barton, I mean; and then, as I thought that I might not see you again for weeks, for months, perhaps——” he stopped, not because he had no words, but for breath, and to regain his composure. “I knew you would be angry, but—what was I to do? You had forbidden me—well, you hadn’t given me permission to call on you——”
She caught her under-lip in her teeth; he was using the argument in his defense which she had used for him in the morning.
—“And I thought I would write it. Miss Marlowe, you shall blame me for sending that note to you, for asking you to meet me here. It was wrong, impertinent, whatever you like to call it, but I had a distinct object——”
She did not start, but looked at him for a moment with faint surprise, then looked at the brook.
“I wanted to tell you something,” he said, not so smoothly or glowing now, but with a sudden gravity in his voice, an intensity in the expression of his eyes that ought to have warned her; but it did not, for she looked at him with calm surprise.
“It will sound sudden to you, sudden and abrupt, I daresay,” he said. “I—I can’t help it! It seems sudden to me, and yet sometimes I feel as if I had known you for years—all my life. Miss Marlowe, when a man finds that the face and the voice of a girl are haunting him day and night, that he cannot drive them out of his head for half a minute, when he is only happy when he is near her and altogether wretched when he is away from her, there is only one explanation: He is in love with that girl. I am in love with you!”