"How improper!" "Not necessarily," he answered. "Take me too."
She sat up in her chair and regarded him steadily.
"Am I to regard this," she asked, "as an offer of marriage?"
"Well, it sounds like it," he admitted.
"Dear me. You might have given me a little more notice," she said.
"Let me think for a moment, please."
Perhaps their thoughts travelled back in the same direction. He remembered his cousin and his playfellow, the fairest and daintiest girl he had ever seen, his best friend, his constant companion. He remembered the days when she had first become something more to him, the miseries of that time, his hopeless ineligibility—the separation. Then the years of absence, the terrible branding years of his life, the horrible pit, the time when night and day his only prayer had been the prayer for death. The self-repression of years seemed to grow weaker and weaker. He held out his hands. But she hesitated.
"Dear," she said, "you make me very happy. It is wonderful to think this may come after all these years. But there is something which I wish to say to you first."
"Well?"
"You are very, very dear to me now—as you are—but you are not the man I loved years ago. You are a very different person indeed. Sometimes I am almost afraid of you.
"You have no cause to be," he said. "Indeed, you have no cause to be.
So far as you are concerned I have never changed. I am the same man."