"I reckon I ought to have guessed it.... I'd heard hints."
"It seemed a slavish hard thing to write," he confessed heavily. "I tried it—more than once—but when I read it over it sounded so different from what I meant to say that—" There he paused, and even had she been inclined to visit upon him the maximum instead of the minimum of blame, there was no escaping his sincerity or the depth of his contrition. "That, until I saw you—night before last—I didn't have any true idea—how much you cared."
"I didn't aim that you ever should—have any idea."
"Happy," he rose and with the blood receding from his skin looked down at her, as she sat there in the moonlight, "Happy, it seems like I never knew you—really—until now."
She was, in her quietly borne distress, an appealing picture, and the hands that lay in her lap had the unmoving stillness of wax—or death.
It had to be said, so he went on. "I never realized before now how fine you are—or how much too good you are for me. I've come over here tonight to ask you to marry me—if it ain't too late."
The girl flinched as if she had been struck. Not even for a moment did her eagerness betray her into the delusion that this proposal was anything other than a merciful effort to soothe a hurt for which he felt himself blamable.
Just as she had meant to keep from him the extent of her heart's bruising, so he was seeking now to make amends at the cost of all his future happiness. Having blundered, he was tendering what payment lay in possibility.
"No, Boone," she said firmly. "We'd both live in hell for always—unless we loved each other—so much that nothin' else counted."
"I've got to be honest," he miserably admitted. "It wouldn't be fair to you not to be. I've got to go on loving her—while there's life in me, I reckon—loving her above all the world. But she's young—and there'll be lots of men of her own kind courtin' her. I reckon"—those were hard words to say, but he said them—"I reckon you had the right of it when you said I was fixin' to break my heart anyhow. They won't ever let her marry me."