"That may well be, but it need not have been. Youth does not die with the earlier illusions. If all had gone well, you would have been reborn into a saner and more conscious youth. Tell me—" Her voice trembled, but she moved forward resolutely and laid her muff against his chest; he could feel the working of her hands, and eyes and cheeks betrayed the excitement that pride still suppressed. "Tell me,—if you had waited, if you could have decently buried that old illusion and forgotten—and—and married me,—should you have felt very old?"
"I should have felt immortal."
He caught her hands from her muff and flung them about his neck and lifted her from the ground and kissed her as if they both stood on the pinnacle and had but a moment before plunging down to mortal death.
When he released her a trifle, his face was illuminated. It no longer looked preternaturally strong; neither did it look as young as she had seen it look in moments of mental relaxation.
"Ah!" she whispered. "This is the fusing, not when that old illusion died."
The deep flush ebbed out of his face, leaving it grey, but he did not relax the hard pressure of his arms. "Of what use," he asked bitterly, "when we have only to-day?"
"It is something to realise all of oneself if only for an hour. And you have given me my supreme hour. That was my right, for I went down into such depths as you have no knowledge of; and if I struggled out of them alone, and always in terror of surrender and demoralisation at the last moment, I have my claim on your help now, for the future is something I have never dared to face. I guessed before Polly told me—oh, I guessed! I knew you so well. In dreams, perhaps,—who knows?—our minds may have become one. When I came up out of—got past the worst, it seemed to me that I came into an extraordinary understanding of you. I can bear anything now. In a way, you will always be mine. The life of the imagination must have its satisfactions. There are worse things than living alone."
She drew down his head, but this time she put her lips to his ear.
"Now I am going to tell you a terrible secret," she said.