"Glad!" he cried out. "Gladness is no word for my feeling about that—for what I feel every moment of every hour."
"Yet you wish it had been some one else."
"I don't!"
"But you said you did, Denis."
"Well, and I have felt it, too, when I couldn't send you a single message—couldn't make a single sign—for fear you should think—for fear you should misunderstand!"
Nan had not raised her eyes again; his tone made it difficult now. He was leaning toward her, almost bending over her, and yet his foot clung to the pine-stump as though by conscious effort of the will, and his face was a fight between set jaw and yearning eyes. But Nan could not see his face; she could only see the sunlight and the shadows in the lavender skirts that spread about her as she sat, and a few inches of hard yellow ground beyond. She was beginning to believe in his love, to understand his position before he explained it to her, to see the end of her own doubts. His halting voice was more eloquent than many words.
And yet for words she was constrained to probe.
"So you determined to go up to the diggings?"
"I did."
"And to leave me?"