"It would be the logical thing for me to say that you have wholly misjudged me, Louise," he said to her when she had finished. "But I am not going to do that, because I know that you have done nothing of the sort. You are simply the victim of a perfectly natural supersensitiveness. I know how difficult you have found it to say such things. I blame myself for having pressed you to the point where you considered it necessary to say them. It is scarcely less hard for me to talk of such a matter—harder still because nothing that you have touched upon has even once occurred to me. I know that you are the woman my heart craves for. Nothing that you have said, or ever can say, will change that. And if you care for me—"
"I do," Louise interrupted him. "You are never out of my thoughts. I find it hard to believe that there ever was a time when I did not know you and love you."
The beautiful spontaneity and frankness of the avowal sent the blood pounding at Blythe's temples.
"Then do you suppose, Louise," he said to her, in a vibrant voice of enthrallment, "that anything in this world of God can ever keep us apart? Everything gives way—must give way—to the love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man. You speak of my ambition, my career. What would they be worth to me without you? Vain things—things that I would thrust away from me! I tell you it has come to pass that my life is inseparably bound up in yours. All the rest would be a futile striving without you. The great miracle of life has come upon me. There was a time when I feared that it would pass me by. You are the woman of all my dreams—the dreams of boy and man. How can anything stand between us?"
"I have thought that, too, often," said Louise, no less moved by his fervor than he had been by her avowal. "But the thought that I might be the means of throwing a shadow upon your path—"
"Shadow!" broke out Blythe. "There would be no path for me without you!"
"But, dear," said Louise, conscious that her ground was giving way beneath her, "we cannot always do that which we want to do, can we? We owe each other unselfishness at least, if only on account of our love? And if you were to be swept by a regret in the time that is to come, how—"
"Don't say that, Louise," said Blythe. "It is too impossible. It is too inconceivable."
They came to a pause in their stroll and stood, hands on rail, gazing over the billowing expanse of sun-sparkling sea.
"You will give me time to think it all out, dear, won't you?" said Louise. "My experience has been so small that I do not often presume to feel very sure of my ground."