Percy laid his hand gently on her arm.
"You do not lose my friendship," he said. "Remember, I shall always be your loyal friend, ready to do you any favor. But the close companionship and intimate association of the last year becomes every day more impossible. You must realize it yourself."
"I do, I do," she said, and then she put her hands over her face, and her tears fell through the slender fingers.
"I wish I had been buried in the sea, too;" she sobbed. "I would not have been so much alone as I am upon this dreary earth, where every thing dear is taken from me."
He turned and took her hands down from her tear wet face, and drew them closely in his own.
His face was very pale. His voice trembled with the intensity of his emotions.
"Listen to me Dolores," he said, in a low, and almost stern tone. "I think we understand and respect each other's views perfectly. I think, if in a moment of profound sorrow like this, we disregarded the settled convictions of a life-time, that we should in calmer and brighter hours regret it. But I think also, that when two people have become so necessary to each other's lives as we have become,—when such perfect sympathy exists, as exists between us,—I think then, Dolores, that it is wicked to throw aside the happiness which might be theirs. George Eliot and Mr. Lewes did not throw it away; Shelley and Mary Godwin did not; Mary Wollstonecraft and Imlay did not. It is simply a question whether a woman cares more for the forms of Society, and the laws made by men, than she cares for the love and companionship of one man. I have found more happiness in this year of association with you, than I supposed it possible for life to afford me. You are to me an ideal comrade: I can picture years of such companionship; happy wanderings, sweet home-comings, quiet evenings, cosy suppers, and all with the perfect knowledge that it might cease at any time either or both wearied of it; all with the knowledge that the individual liberty of each was absolutely untrammeled; and that, when love ceased to exist—there were no bonds to fetter. It seems to me that happiness, as perfect as it ever exists in this world, might bless such an union of two lives. Dolores, will you accept the love and protection I offer you?"
Her hands had rested passive in his, while she listened. Her face was turned from him, her eyes gazing out over the expanse of sea. Not a sail was in sight. One solitary gull flapped lonesome wings above the inhospitable waves. It seemed to her that her life was like that gull's—the world stretched before her, like a great waste of water, shoreless and desolate. She thought of the monotonous years awaiting her, homeless and alone as she was; of the ghastly emptiness of every pleasure, if she no more saw his face, no more heard his voice. She shivered slightly, and his hands tightened their clasp upon her own. His touch thrilled her with a sweet inexplicable joy. She ceased to reason or think.
Turning her white, beautiful, strangely calm face up to his, she answered solemnly and distinctly: