“Great God!” he cried. “You do not mean to say that you love me, Beatrice?”
“If you could only see my face now, you would know it,” said she. “My eyes would tell you all—no, not all—that is in my heart.”
He caught her hands, after first grasping a few handfuls of clammy rock, for the hands of the truest lovers do not meet mechanically.
“I see them,” he whispered—“I see your eyes through the darkness. My love, my love!”
He did not kiss her. His soul revolted from the idea of the commonplace kiss in the friendly secrecy of the darkness.
There are opportunities and opportunities. He believed that if he had kissed her then she would never have forgiven him, and he was right. “What a fool I was!” he cried. “Two nights ago, when I overheard a man tell you, as I had told you long ago—so long ago—more than a week ago—that he did not want you to pass out of his sight—when I heard you make the same promise to him as you had made to me, I felt as if there was nothing left for me in the world. I went out into the darkness, and as I stood at the place when I first saw you, I thought that I should be doing well if I were to throw myself headlong down those rocks into the sea that the rain was beating upon. Beatrice, God only knows if it would be better or worse for you if I had thrown myself down—if I were to leave you standing alone here now.”
“Do not say those words—they are like the words I asked you before not to say. Even then your words meant everything to me. They mean everything to me still.”
He gave a little laugh. Triumph rang through it. He did not seem to think that his laughter might sound incongruous to her.
“This is my hour,” he said. “Whatever fate may have in store for me it cannot make me unlive this hour. And to think that I had got no idea that such an hour should ever come to me—that you should ever come to me, my beloved! But you came to me. You came to me when I had tried to bring myself to feel that there was something worth living for in the world apart from love.”
“And now?”