“Shall I come back?” he said, after looking into her eyes with a curious expression in his. “Will you ask me to return?”
“I will—I will—I will,” she cried. “Please return and tell me if I said anything that hurt you. I would not do so for the world. Nothing but gratitude and good feeling for you was in my heart. Oh yes, pray return.”
“If I were wise I should not have returned when you made use of that word 'gratitude,'” said he when he had come beside her, through the small rustic gate which she opened for him from the inside. “Gratitude is the opposite to love, and I love you.”
With a startled cry she took a step or two back from him, and held up her hands as if instinctively to avert a blow.
“I have startled you,” he said. “I was rude; but indeed I do not know of any way of saying that I love you except in those words. I have had no experience either in loving or in confessing my love. I came here this morning to say those words to you, but when I looked at you standing beside me under the elm—when I saw how beautiful you were—how full of God's grace, and goodness, and tenderness, and charity, I was so overcome with the thought of my own unworthiness to love such a one as you, that”—
“Oh no, no; for God's sake, do not say that—do not say that,” she cried, holding out her hands to him in an appealing attitude. “Alas! alas! that word love must never pass between us.”
“Why should not the word pass, when my heart and soul”—
“Ah, let me implore of you. I fancied that you knew all—all my story. I forgot that it happened so long ago that people in this neighbourhood had ceased to speak of it years before you came here.”
“Your story? I will believe nothing but what is good of you.”
“My story—my life's story is that I have promised to love another man.”