He waits a moment, for a strange sensation comes in his throat and stops his speech, usually so fluent and so free. Then, she still remaining silent, he goes on with the same grave, earnest tone, and with the same half-eager, half-hesitating tremor in his voice.
"I've never seen any one like you; I know plenty of women, but none like you, Leslie—I beg your pardon! You see, I always think of you as Leslie. If I were to try and tell you how I feel, I should make a mess of it. I can only say that I love you, I love you!"
With all his ignorance and lack of eloquence he is wise. "I love you," sums up all a woman wants or cares to hear.
"Of course," he goes on in a lower voice, daunted by her silence, her motionless, downcast face, her hidden eyes. "Of course, I can't expect, don't expect you to understand or—or to care for me even a little. You haven't known me long enough or—or—anything about me. All I want is a little hope. If you don't dislike me, right down dislike me, I'll be glad enough, and I'll try and get you to love me a little. You can't love me as I love you; that isn't to be thought of!"
"Is it not?" she thinks, but she says nothing.
Up above their heads a thrush is singing melodiously, and the liquid notes seem to say quite plainly, "I love you." The sun, as it shines between the leaves of the old oak, and touches Yorke's brave, and eager face, is surely smiling, "He loves you!" The stream rippling in a hollow behind them, as it runs laughing down to the sea, is as certainly murmuring, "Love, love, love!"
"You are angry and—and offended," he says, after a pause, during which she has been listening to this harmony of nature's voices. "Well, I deserve it! I ought to have waited until you knew more of me—but you see, as I said, I could not keep it. I had been thinking of you, dreaming of you, all night, and then I saw you suddenly, and I felt as if I must speak, happen what might. If I hadn't seen you, I dare say I could have found heart enough to clear out, and—and hold my tongue; but when I saw you with that little one in your arms, looking so beautiful and so good, just the Leslie I love so dearly, the words rushed out almost before I knew it—and—and——," he squares his broad chest, and tilts his hat back with a gesture which, unlike most gestures, fits him like a glove, "there it is!"
She does not lift her face, does not open the lips that are trembling—if he could only see it; and he waits a moment before he says, sadly, with the lover's despairing note audible through an affected cheerfulness:
"I'm—I'm sorry that I've made a nuisance of myself, and—and worried you. Don't be upset and think anything of it. I ought not to have spoken. I couldn't help loving you, but I might have had the sense to hold my tongue, and taken myself off without distressing you. Don't—don't think any more of it. I'm not worthy of you, not worth a thought from such as you, and—well, I'll say good-by, Miss Lisle."
He puts his hat straight, and braces himself together, so to speak, for the parting; then he bends down and takes her hand, the hand that lies in the lap of the pretty morning frock like a white flower.