So this was Love. This unreasoning joy, this absorbing desire to hap and to hold, to let all else slip by and be forgotten as nothing worth; to live for oneself alone--oneself, since he and she were one--one only!
Yes; she loved him like that. And he? The memory of his voice, the clasp of his hand, the touch of his lips came back to her in a rush, dazing and bewildering her utterly, so that she stretched her arms into the night and whispered into the darkness: "Paul, come back! you must come back and tell me what it means. Paul! Paul!"
But he was gone; and then the pity of it, the shame that he had left her came home to her, not for herself, but for him, and with a little short, sharp cry, such as will come with sudden physical pain, she turned on her way tearless, composed, half stunned by her own emotion.
When she had undressed she blew out the candle, and, kneeling by the window, pressed her forehead against the cool glass while she gazed unseeingly into the night.
So this was Love!--the Love which the poets called divine--the Love to which she had looked forward all her life. What did it mean? What was it, this feeling which had come to her unbidden, unrecognised? For now with opened eyes she understood that it had been there almost from the beginning; that it had been the cause of all her moods and his. The curious attraction and repulsion, the unrest, the desire to influence him. Ought she to have known this sooner? Perhaps; and yet, how could she when neither her own nature or her education had given her a hint of this thing? The Love she had dreamed of had been a thing of the mind, of conscious choice, and this was not. No! best to tell the truth--it was not!
As she knelt there, alone in her ignorance, not so much of evil as of the realities of life, she could yet see that this unreasoning attraction--though with her it could not but be indissolubly mixed up with something higher, something nobler than itself; something which craved a like nobility in its object--was yet in its very essence of the earth earthy.
Without that something what was it?
She was clear sighted was this girl, whose reasoning powers had been trained to be truthful; so she did not attempt to deny that Paul Macleod was not her ideal of what a man should be. That her whole soul went out in one desire that he should be so, and in a tender longing to help him, to comfort and console him, did not alter the fact. That desire, that longing, was apart from this bewildering emotion which filled the world with the cry, "He loves me! He loves me!" She loved him as he was; not as he ought to be.
As he was! And then her eyes seemed to come back from the darkness and find a light as she remembered those words of his: "It is not only as if I loved you as men count love."
Then he, too, understood--he, too, was torn in twain. A sense of companionship seemed to come to her; she rose from her knees and crept to bed. And as she lay awake the slow tears fell on her pillow. So this was Love! this bitter pain, this keener joy; but underneath his stress of passion, and her fainter reflection of it, lay something which might bring peace if he would let it, and the thought of this made her whisper softly:--