“Well, no I can’t. I could believe myself mistaken with regard to any other person’s face. I could think I had let my imagination play tricks with me; but not with your face.”
“Why not with mine?”
Their heads were close together, the music was playing, and there was nobody near enough to hear. So he blurted out the words which he had that morning thought it impossible that he should ever say to this woman who charmed him, but tantalized him at the same time.
“Because I love you.”
“You love a pickpocket?”
“No, no, no.”
“But it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“No. I don’t believe your explanation; I can’t. But I don’t believe either that you could be guilty of anything that was not absolutely honorable and right. I’d rather believe that my own senses had betrayed me than believe one word of anything but good about you.”
When he had once begun Gerard found himself fluent enough. He would rather have expected, if he had left himself time to expect anything, that Miss Davison would have affected to scoff at his abrupt confession, and would have laughed at him and as it were brushed him from her path with scorn, putting on airs of indignation that he should dare to make a sort of accusation against her in one breath, and a declaration of love to her the next.
But she did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he saw her face change, the muscles tremble, the head bend, and a tear glitter in her eye.