"No; love. If it hadn't been for me, you might never have known what love is."
His saying it was only an upbubbling of love's audacity, but she chose to take it seriously. She was gazing afar into the depths of the fresh-green forest darkening softly to the sunset, with her hands clasped around the tangle of late-blooming white azaleas in her lap.
"It is a high gift," she said soberly; "the highest of all for a woman. Once I thought I should live and die without knowing it, as many women do. I wish I might give you something as great."
"I am already overpaid," he asserted. "For a man there is nothing so great, no influence so nearly omnipotent, as the love of a good woman. It is the lever that moves the world—what little it does move—up the hill to the high planes."
"A lever?" she mused; "yes, perhaps. But levers are only links in the chain binding cause to effect."
His smile was lovingly tolerant.
"Is that what your religion has brought you to, Ardea—a full-grown belief in a Providence that takes cognizance of our little ant-wanderings up and down the human runways?"
"Yes, I think so," she said; but she said it without hesitancy or a shadow of doubt.
"I'm glad; glad you have attained," he rejoined quite unaffectedly.
"It was hardly attainment, in my case," she qualified; and, after a momentary pause, she added: "any more than it was in yours."