"It's so very nice of you to say—" she began.
"I mean it all, too—every word of it," he said gently. "It's all come back to me—"
"Don't you think we'd better go in where the children are?" she asked nervously, backing toward the door, the light in her eyes very bright. "This—this, Mr. Van Pycke, is the pantry."
He flushed. "I—I dare say it does seem rather like backstairs gallantry," he said, in genuine humility.
"I didn't mean it in that way," she cried instantly. "It was the most beautiful thought I've ever heard expressed." She stopped suddenly. "Are you coming?"
"Not until I've said the rest of it," he said, looking over his shoulder. Then, with fierce eagerness, drawing closer to her: "I adored you when you were eight. You may call it boyish impulse or whatever you like. Be that as it may, I've never loved any one else. A hundred times I've tried to picture the face, the form, the character of the girl I'd really come to love. Always there came to my mind a face—not a child's face, but a child's face grown to a woman's. It was always the same. The face of the little girl who grew up in my brain without being observed—without a sign that she was there. When she was fifteen, she was fifteen to my dreams; when she was twenty, I imagined her as such. She grew up with me. Every year I saw the change in the girl I pictured as the one I could love. No other came up to that ideal. There could be no other, for there was a real girl there all the time. I loved you years ago, Mary Pembroke, and I must tell you that—"
"Oh, you mustn't say it—you mustn't!" she cried, tremulously, putting out her hand. "It—it doesn't seem real—it wouldn't seem honest. Please, please don't treat it lightly. Don't spoil it all by—"
"I never was so serious," he said. "I—I didn't mean to shock you. It must sound foolish to you. Of course, I've never meant anything to you. It's all on my side. I've been too abrupt. I've been an awful ass to blurt it out to you so soon. Why, you can't help looking upon me as a total stranger. You haven't thought of me in years and years."
"Oh, I haven't forgotten the spindle-shanked boy," she said in a very low voice. "You may not have known it, my friend, but I was very deeply in love with you in the days of the old Campania. I was—"
"You were! You really were?" he cried, with difficulty reducing it to a half whisper.