She shook her small, clenched fists. “We’re not, we’re not! Oh, yes, you can be, if you like; but I didn’t mean it would hold me in that way. I meant it would be like a sign—of you. I shouldn’t be able to forget you; you would be there in the ring, in the box, in the drawer, like the portrait of Aunt Sophia’s—” She stopped herself. “And I can’t burn you.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about. I suppose I ought to.”
“No, you oughtn’t.” She sprang up, delivered from her weakness. “This is nonsense. Of course, I can’t keep your ring. Take it back, Charles. It’s beautiful. I thought it would be all red and blue like a flag, but it’s lovely. It makes my mouth water. It’s like white fire.”
“It’s like you,” he said. “You’re just as bright and just as hard, and if only you were as small, I could put you in my pocket and never let you go.”
She opened her eyes very wide. “Then why do you let me go?” she asked on an ascending note, and she did not mean to taunt him. It would be so easy for him to keep her, if he knew how. She expected a despairing groan, she half hoped for a violent embrace, but he answered quietly, “I don’t really let you go. It’s you I love, not just your hair and your face and the way your nose turns up, and your hands and feet, and your straight neck. I have to let them go, but you don’t go. You stay with me all the time: you always will. You’re like music, always in my head, but you’re more than that. You go deeper: I suppose into my heart. Sometimes I think I’m carrying you in my arms. I can’t see you but I can feel you’re there, and sometimes I laugh because I think you’re laughing.”
She listened, charmed into stillness. Here was an echo of his outpouring in the darkness of that hour by the Monks’ Pool, but these words were closer, dearer. She felt for that moment that he did indeed carry her in his arms and that she was glad to be there. He spoke so quietly, he was so certain of his love that she was exalted and abashed. She did not deserve all this, yet he knew she was hard as well as bright, he knew her nose turned up. Perhaps there was nothing he did not know.
He went on simply, without effort. “And though I’m ugly and a fool, I can’t be hurt whatever you choose to do. What you do isn’t you.” He touched himself. “The you is here. So it doesn’t matter about the ring. It doesn’t matter about Francis Sales.”
She said on a caught breath and in a whisper, “What about him?”
He looked at her and made a slight movement with the hands hanging at his sides, a little flicking movement, as though he brushed something away. “I think perhaps you are going to marry him,” he said deeply.
Her head went up. “Who told you that?” she demanded.