“Not one of them would have left me for a bear.”
“Which does not argue that they loved you better than I, merely that they are different. None of them succeeded in winning you, I may observe; and the way you treat them when they bore you makes me blush for my sex. Yesterday you fairly swept Mr. Geary out with a broom.”
“I wanted to be alone with you.”
Cecil was facing her, his hands in his pockets. His eyes were smiling, but his jaw was set in a way she had taken note of two days before: she had demanded a confession of his past relations with women, and he had merely set his jaw and made no reply.
“Are you going?”
He nodded, still smiling. His hands were working nervously in his pockets, but she did not see them.
She gasped slightly. “I cannot believe it,” she said.
“That I can love you as passionately as a man ever loved a woman, and yet leave you to complete a record which means a good deal to me? If I were going to live in California I would put it off for a year—with scarcely a regret; but it is now or never. Surely you will be reasonable.”
“You can go if you like, but you need not come back!” and she made a rush for the door.
He caught her in his arms, and held her so closely that she could not move. “I shall go, and I shall come back, and I shall marry you on the first of July. And believe this—I cannot get back quickly enough.”