“Will you be so good as to give me a direct answer? Why did you come rushing here—headlong—when you knew perfectly well——” He paused and his severe eyes accused her.
She moved a step closer; her hands fluttered up from her side and dropped again; she bit her lip. “Because,” she said, in the lowest of voices, “I love you—and—and where you were I—wanted to be.”
The chair which supported Evan tipped forward and clattered again into place. He stared at her as if she were some very strange laboratory specimen indeed, and then said in his most insistently didactic voice, punctuating his words with a waggling forefinger, “You don’t mean to stand there—and to tell me—that you love me!”
Carmel gave a little laugh.
“Don’t you want me to?”
“That,” he said, “is beside the question.... You ... you ... love me?”
She nodded.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “You couldn’t. Nobody could.... I’ve been studying this—er—matter of love, and I am assured of my complete unfitness to arouse such an emotion.”
Her heart misgave her. “Evan—you—you love me?”
“I do,” he said, emphatically. “Most assuredly I do, but——”