“With all our hearts,” Ralston answered, in a dreamy tone.
“Then when shall it be, Jack?” Katharine leaned towards him and touched his hand with her fingers as though to rouse him from the reverie into which he seemed to be falling.
The touch thrilled him, and he looked up suddenly and met her glance. He looked at her steadily for a moment, and once more he felt that odd, pleasurable, unmanly moisture in his
eyes, with a sweeping wave of emotion that rose from his heart with a rush as though it would burst his throat. He yielded to it altogether this time, and catching her in his arms drew her passionately to him, kissing her again and again, as though he had never kissed her before. He did not understand it himself, and Katharine was not used to it. But she loved him, too, with all her heart, as it seemed to her. She had proved it to him and to herself more completely within the last half hour, and she let her own arms go round him. Then a deep, dark blush which she could feel, rose slowly from her throat to her cheeks, and she instinctively disentangled herself from him and drew gently back.
“Remember that it’s for my sake—not for yours, dear,” she said.
Her grey eyes were as deep as the dusk itself. Vaguely she guessed her power as she gave him one more long look, and then rose suddenly and pretended to busy herself with the single light, turning it up a little and then down. Ralston watched the springing curves that outlined her figure as she reached upward. He was in many ways a strangely refined man, in spite of all his sins, and of his besetting sin in particular, and refinement in others appealed to him strongly when it was healthy and natural. He detested the diaphanous type of semi-consumptive with the angel face, man or woman, and declared that a skeleton deserved no credit for looking refined, since it could not possibly look anything else. But he delighted in delicacy of touch and grace of movement when it went with such health and strength as Katharine had.
“You are the most divinely beautiful thing on earth,” he said, quietly.
Katharine laughed, but still turned her face away from him.
“Then marry me,” she said, laughing. “What a speech!” she cried an instant later. “Just fancy if any one could hear me, not knowing what we’ve been talking about!”