She turned and laid a hand on his arm. Her voice came with a musical vehemence.
"If I do come to love you, I think it will be heaven or hell to me. I'm not going to be angry until I've thought about it—and thought hard, and I'm not going to love you unless you make me. Come, let's go back."
As they turned into the path toward the house, she broke irrelevantly into laughter.
"When you lighted your match—and burned your fingers—what did you think of my pearls?"
"I didn't see them," he promptly replied. "Were you wearing pearls?"
Confused by the sudden and marvelous consciousness of all life being changed at a stroke, of doors that had swung wide between all the old and all the new, Mary Burton walked as in a daze, her fingers toying with the gems about her neck. But before she had taken many steps the man laid a hand on her arm and halted her. When she turned he caught her by her shoulders and his words came tumultuously and with an impassioned earnestness.
"You must not deny me the chance to say something more," he declared. "What I have said is either too much or too little. You ask me whether I saw your pearls. When I first spoke to you—a child with all autumn's glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty? No. I saw you—only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that moment in my heart?"
She looked back at him and asked faintly, "What was it?"
"That same chemistry of souls," he declared. "That same writing of our futures in one horoscope; a voice that decreed: 'You shall wait for her,' though I did not understand its message—until now. And now that I have seen you, how can I think of pearls?"
To hear words of love spoken in a wild onrush of feeling was no new experience to Mary Burton, yet it was as though she had never heard them before. In the past her ears had heard, but now her heart was listening, and her heart pounded in her breast as it drank in what the man said. He talked fast, with his eyes on her eyes, and his hands grasping her white shoulders. His heart, too, rather than his tongue, was speaking.