“Because I can never be your wife.”
“Why not?”
“I do not love you—like that.”
Silence for half a block, the man’s lips pressed hard together under his mustache, the girl’s heart beating suffocatingly. When he spoke, his voice sounded oddly clear in the hushed night air.
“What do you mean by ‘like that’?”
Her little hand was clinched tight as it lay on his arm. The perfect silence that followed the words of each made every movement significant.
“You know,—as a woman loves the man she would marry, not as she loves a brotherly cousin.”
“The difference is not clear to me—but—how did you learn the difference?”
“How dare you?” she cried, flashing a pair of dark, wet eyes upon him.
“In such a case, ‘I dare do all that may become a man.’ Besides, even if there is a difference, I still ask you to be my wife. You would not regret it, Ruth, I think.”