“Time enough for that next year,” returned Irving. He laid his watch on his knee; and for a minute they both watched the tiny second-hand, inexorably hurrying.
“How quiet it is!” he said. “What a place for the year to die. I have a kindness for this old year, Rosalie. I should dread to see it go if I didn’t have such hopes for the new.”
“Yes, your business prospects are brilliant, Mr. Derwent told me once.”
“Betsy Foster,” said Irving slowly, “‘Clever Betsy,’ that deep, dark, deceitful, and designing woman who is upstairs now, wide-awake, wondering what I am saying to you, talked to you once about me, and told you to remember that men were deceivers ever. She warned you against me. She’s given me an up-hill pull all summer.”
Rosalie’s heart fluttered wildly.
“I wasn’t sure until I had been back in Boston for weeks that I loved you; but I suspected it. I know that I have nothing more than a fair chance, if I have that; but I’m sure now, Rosalie, that you are the one woman in the world for me. You’re the combination of everything I ever admired in any girl. If there is no one that has a better right, give me the chance to win you. I’ve come here to ask you that.”
She sat so immovable that Irving stooped forward. The face she lifted had the darkening eyes, the trembling lips, that Betsy had seen.
“When you caught me from the cliff,” she said, “I felt your heart beat. The sunrise in the canyon was the sunrise of my life. Every pulse of my heart since that morning has beaten with the pulse of yours.”
He looked at her, wonder, incredulity, joy, holding him motionless for a space; then in the still, snow-bound cottage, golden with firelight, Rosalie’s lover took her in his arms. “My dove!” he murmured.