“What!” he cried. “I don’t believe you do understand!”
“I do! You mean you think—you might—later on—fall in love with me.”
Her sublime candour touched him almost beyond endurance. He walked a few paces away from her, to the very edge of the pool, and tried to calm his heart with that unutterable beauty, that fall of water, like bright silver hair in the moonlight, like a stream from the moon itself, over the face of the cliff, without sound, into the radiant brightness of the pool. If there had been a nightingale to sing there, he thought, it would have broken his heart.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, in a low voice, “I am in love with you now. I shouldn’t have told you if you’d let me alone.”
“Why shouldn’t I know?”
“Because—I don’t feel like amusing you that way.”
“Oh, but I don’t—really I don’t look at it like that! How can you always think so of me? I’m not trivial and shallow,” she cried, very much wounded. “You ought to have seen that I wasn’t!”
“All right!” he said, grimly. “Now you know.”
“And you’re going away?” she asked.
“I am.”