"For the moment! I shall always need you."
"I wish you might." She shook her head slowly. "But you won't. You'll go away. I shall hear about you—all the big things you're accomplishing and planning. And then I shall remember that for just one night I had you for my very own."
"But we're always going to be friends. I shall be always coming back to you."
"Men don't come back, Lord Taborley. A man of your temperament is least likely to come back. You press forward. You're eager. Wherever you go you form new affections. I'm not like that. I'm cold. You don't think so, but then I'm treating you as I never treated any other man. You slipped under my reserve and reached my heart before I could stop you. Do you know how I'm treating you? Just the way I'd like some good woman to treat my little Eric one day, when I'm not here and he's a man."
"But you're going to be here for a long time—just as long as I am." There was alarm in his assertion. "I couldn't bear to think of your not being in the world. It wouldn't matter so much whether I saw you; it would be the knowledge that I could see you; that would make all the difference."
"Would it?"
"Yes, I'm sure. You mustn't think that because there was Terry and—I'm ashamed to have to own it—a passing fancy for your sister, that I'm fickle."
"I don't. I never thought it for a moment. What
I thought was that you were unhappy. People do a lot of foolish things when they're unhappy."
"It seems so long since I was unhappy," he said gently. "You've healed everything."