"I have come to find out about yours," John explained. "That is why I am here. Perhaps I ought to have waited a little time before I spoke to you as I did just now. Come, you can forget what I have said and done; but to me it will be an everlasting joy. I shall treasure the memory of it. It will help me—I can't tell you quite in what way it will help me. But for the rest, I will serve my apprenticeship. I will try to get into sympathy with the things that please you. It will not take me long. As soon as you feel that we are drawing closer together, I will ask you again what I have asked you this afternoon. In the meantime, I may be your friend, may I not? You will let me see a great deal of you? You will help me just a little?"
Louise leaned back in her chair. She had been carried off her feet, brought face to face with emotions which she dared not analyze. Perhaps, after all her self-dissection, there were still secret chambers. She thought almost with fear of what they might contain. Her sense of superiority was vanishing. She was, after all, like other women.
"Yes," she promised, "I will help. We will leave it at that. Some day you shall talk to me again, if you like. In the meantime, remember we are both free. You have not known many women, and you may change your mind when you have been longer in London. Perhaps it will be better for you if you do!"
"That is quite impossible," John said firmly. "You see," he went on, looking at her with shining eyes, "I know now what I half believed from the first moment that I saw you. I love you!"
Springing restlessly to her feet, she walked across the room and back again. Action of some sort seemed imperative. A curious hypnotic feeling seemed to be dulling all her powers of resistance. She looked into her life and she was terrified. Everything had grown insignificant. It couldn't really be possible that with her brains, her experience, this man who had dwelt all his life in the simple ways had yet the power to show her the path toward the greater things!
Through the complex web of emotions which made up her temperament there suddenly sprang a primitive instinct, the primitive instinct of all women, rebelling against the first touch of a master's hand. Was she to find herself wrong and this man right? Was she to submit, to accept from his hand the best gifts of life—she who had looked for them in such very high, such very inaccessible places?
She felt like a child again. She trembled a little as she sat down by his side. It was not in this fashion that she had intended to hear what he had to say.
"I don't know what is the matter with me to-day," she murmured distractedly. "I think I must send you away. You disturb my thoughts. I can't see life clearly. Don't hope for too much from me," she begged. "But don't go away," she added, with a sudden irresistible impulse of anxiety. "Oh, I wish—I wish you understood me and everything about me, without my having to say a word!"
"I feel what you are," he answered, "and that is sufficient."
Once more she rose to her feet and walked across to the window. An automobile had stopped in the street below. She looked down upon it with a sudden frozen feeling of apprehension.