"I am afraid that I did not," said Blythe, nervously rising and facing her. "Perhaps it was as well, too. For the first time in my life I am in more than one mind as to whether a certain sort of candor is always desirable."
Having thus plunged into the domain of the purely ethical, Blythe could scarcely have expected an offhand reply. As a matter of fact, he got no reply at all.
"What I am striving to say, I suppose, Louise," he went on, taking himself a little better in hand, "is that, after you sail tomorrow, I am going to be more lonesome than I have ever been in my life before."
"Is that so hard to say?" Louise asked.
"Not when it is rewarded by so helpful an answer," said Blythe, conscious of a throbbing at his temples.
"I do not find it in the least hard to say that I shall miss you," said Louise, frankly enough; nevertheless, to give herself countenance, she picked up from the table a little carved ivory tiger and examined it with great apparent curiosity.
"Miss me for—for my guardianly wisdom and ghostly counsel?" said Blythe, his wide smile visibly nervous. Then, when there was a pause, he pressed the point: "Is that it, Louise?"
Her silence did not imply affirmation, and, the throbbing at his temples increasing, Blythe knew it. He bent over her chair, gently but firmly removed the ivory tiger from her hands, took one of them in his own, and said:
"Listen to me, Louise. I am fearful, if I do not plunge ahead, of becoming entangled in a weave of subtleties. I don't want to be incoherent, even if my excuse would be that I became so while taking a desperate chance. I haven't the least idea what you think of me—I don't mean as your guardian and interested friend, but as a man very susceptible to human impulses. But I am not debarred from finding out. And I should have no right to ask you such a question before telling you, as I tell you now, that I love you." She rose as he spoke, her hand still tightly grasped in his, and their eyes mingled. "You have set a new light to glow within me. I am conscious of a new propulsion that I never knew before—that I did not believe existed until I met you as a woman grown. It means everything to me—the world and all. I do not know that I am fair in saying this to you. I am incapable of judging. I do know that I want to be fair. After all, there is no unfairness in my simply telling you that I love you. It would be different, I think—but you are to judge of that—if I were to ask you to marry me—yet. But that, Louise, is what I came here to ask you."
There is no eloquence, however ornately phrased, to compare with that of a man or a woman who is altogether in earnest. Louise thrilled under the quiet, but, as she knew, deeply-felt words of this man whose clear-cut, rugged face, as he spoke, became positively handsome. She placed an impulsive hand on his arm.