‘I implore you not to count on that! In many ways I am wretchedly weak. I have no such confidence in myself.’
‘Then I will have confidence for both.’
‘But can you love me for my own sake—love me as a man?’
‘I love you!’
And the words sang about him, filled the air with a mad pulsing of intolerable joy, made him desire to fling himself in passionate humility at her feet, to weep hot tears, to cry to her in insane worship. He thought her beautiful beyond anything his heart had imagined; her warm gold hair was the rapture of his eyes and of his reverent hand. Though slenderly fashioned, she was so gloriously strong. ‘Not a day of illness in her life,’ said Mrs Yule, and one could readily believe it.
She spoke with such a sweet decision. Her ‘I love you!’ was a bond with eternity. In the simplest as in the greatest things she saw his wish and acted frankly upon it. No pretty petulance, no affectation of silly-sweet languishing, none of the weaknesses of woman. And so exquisitely fresh in her twenty years of maidenhood, with bright young eyes that seemed to bid defiance to all the years to come.
He went about like one dazzled with excessive light. He talked as he had never talked before, recklessly, exultantly, insolently—in the nobler sense. He made friends on every hand; he welcomed all the world to his bosom; he felt the benevolence of a god.
‘I love you!’ It breathed like music at his ears when he fell asleep in weariness of joy; it awakened him on the morrow as with a glorious ringing summons to renewed life.
Delay? Why should there be delay? Amy wished nothing but to become his wife. Idle to think of his doing any more work until he sat down in the home of which she was mistress. His brain burned with visions of the books he would henceforth write, but his hand was incapable of anything but a love-letter. And what letters! Reardon never published anything equal to those. ‘I have received your poem,’ Amy replied to one of them. And she was right; not a letter, but a poem he had sent her, with every word on fire.
The hours of talk! It enraptured him to find how much she had read, and with what clearness of understanding. Latin and Greek, no. Ah! but she should learn them both, that there might be nothing wanting in the communion between his thought and hers. For he loved the old writers with all his heart; they had been such strength to him in his days of misery.