"Can you ask?"
"I do ask."
"I did not want ever to see you again nor to talk to you as we are talking now."
"Answer me, Katrine!" he cried, bending toward her. "Answer me! Why did you never want to see me again?"
There still was the look in her eyes of sweetest frankness as she answered: "There were many reasons before I saw you that first night why I should never wish to see you again. But after that there was only one—one—one that filled my mind. I am afraid."
"Afraid!" he repeated, with the man's look of the chase in his eye, "afraid of what, Katrine?"
She had moved by the fireplace, and with a hand on the chimney-shelf turned her eyes to
meet his own, with the clear, unafraid look in them of the olden times.
"When I first saw you here, the night I sang, I became afraid you were a man whom I had simply overestimated in the past because of my youth. I have avoided you ever since for fear I should find it to be true. I am afraid you are a man who is simply 'not worth while.'" The words were spoken softly, even with a certain odd tenderness, but they struck Francis Ravenel like a blow in the face, and he set his lips, as a man does in physical suffering.
"I think it is just," he said, at length. "I think that describes me as I am: a man who is not worth while. Only, you see, Katrine, I was not prepared to hear the truth from you." He grew white as he spoke. "In all of your letters you spoke so divinely of that old-time love."