With a great effort he drove apprehension and the instant's confused wonder far away, and when, come close to him, she smiled, showing the perfect white teeth, and her eyes softened to a dreamy regard of him, all he had ever felt for her in the past months seemed concentrated into this one moment. Yet he did not look like a languishing lover; rather like one inflamed with a great idea or stirred to a great resolve.
For quite a minute they stood gazing as though they would read the whole truth in each other's eyes. She was all eager, yet timorous; he was resolved; yet now, when the great moment had come, as it were, like a stammerer fearing the sound of his own voice. There was so much to say that he could not speak.
She broke the spell. "I am here. Can't you see me?" she asked in a quizzical, playful tone, her lips trembling a little, but with a smile in her eyes which she vainly tried to veil.
She had said the one thing which above all others could have lifted the situation to its real significance. A few weeks ago the eyes now looking into hers and telling a great story were sealed with night, and the mind behind was fretted by the thought of a perpetual darkness. All the tragedy of the past rushed into his mind now, and gave all that was between them, or was to be between them, its real meaning. A beautiful woman is dear to man simply as woman, and not as the woman; virtue has slain its thousands, but physical charm has slain its tens of thousands! Whatever Ingolby's defects, however, infinitely more than the girl's beauty, more than the palpitating life in her, than red lips and bright eye, than warm breast and clasping hand, was something beneath all which would last, or should last, when the hand was palsied and the eye was dim.
"I am here. Can't you see me?"
All that he had regained in life in her little upper room rushed upon him, and with outstretched arms and in a voice choked with feeling, he said:
"See you! Dear God—To see you and all the world once more! It is being born again to me. I haven't learned to talk in my new world yet; but I know three words of the language. I love you. Come—I'll be good to you."
She drew back from him, and her look said that she would read him to the uttermost word in his life's book, would see the heart of this wonderful thing; and then with a hungry cry, she flung her arms around his neck and pressed her wet eyes against his flushed cheek.
A half-hour later, as they wandered back to the house he suddenly stopped, put his hands on her shoulders, looked earnestly in her eyes, and said:
"God's good to me. I hope I'll remember that."