“Paul!” she remonstrated. She observed him closely as he leaned on his elbow beside her, playing idly with the sand, making patterns on it and effacing these again with his hand. He turned his face towards hers, and his restless hands became still. His keen eyes searched her face.
“That strikes you as exaggerated,” he said; “but it’s not so. I’ve watched you, and I see it coming. You have quite a number of friends who are not my friends—”
“They would be your friends if you would let them,” she interposed.
“Yes; I know it’s my fault; but there it is. You want friends. That’s perfectly natural. You ought to have them. You want amusement. I hoped you wouldn’t need any of these things, that you’d be satisfied, as I am, just to be together. That was expecting too much—”
“Oh! my dear,” she said quickly, with a note of pain in her tones. “I don’t love you less because I love my kind; I love you better in relation to these others. Paul, why do you say these things? They hurt.”
“It wasn’t my intention to hurt you,” he said. “I was merely trying to get the thing square in my mind. I’ve got to get used to these things, you see. I’ve been selfish. When a man loves as I do, he is inclined to grow selfish and exacting. Well, I’ve got to make a fight against that. I don’t like the idea of sharing you with the world at large; but I am forced to consider that as a necessary part of our compact.”
“Compact!” she echoed in a puzzled voice.
“We compacted to love one another,” he answered quietly. “Love stands for sacrifice. If we cannot give way in little things, the big things become more difficult to relinquish. Your brother-in-law made one observation that was profoundly true, though he did not phrase it happily: love and prayer are synonymous terms. My love for you is as a prayer in my heart. I do not wish to lower it to a mere selfish human passion.”
“Oh, Paul!” she said. And suddenly she dropped her face to his hand and her lips caressed it where it lay open, palm upward, on the sand.
His talk of sacrifice made her desire to give up things also, to give up her will to him; but the persuasion that it was good for him to throw off his absorption, to adapt his life to the common rule and live more like other men, held her mute. She would accept his sacrifices, all that he offered, and would prove to him in numberless tender ways how great was her appreciation of the unselfish love he gave her; how intense was her pride in it. She had never loved him so much as in that moment when he gave her an insight into what his conception of love was. He so seldom spoke on the subject, and never before had spoken without reserve; it seemed to her that his talk that day threw a bright ray of light upon his feelings, and revealed to her very clearly the beauty of his ideal of love, hitherto so jealously locked in his inmost thoughts.