"Don't say that, Barbara. There must be use in it. Don't you know in your heart that some day you are going to marry me?"
"No," she said. "Sometimes I've thought so, but I don't know it." She selected an arrow from her quiver, touched the point with venom, and because she had not enjoyed being scolded shot it into him. "And at the moment I don't think so."
Wilmot spoke on patiently. "Every true lover, Barbs," he said, "comes in time to the end of his patience and the end of his endurance."
"And then he ceases from loving--and troubling."
"He does not. When he knows as I know what is best for her happiness and for his, and when he finds that humbleness, and begging, and gentleness, and persuasion are of no avail--why, then if he's a man he makes her love him, makes her marry him."
"I hope, my dear Wilmot," she said, "that you are speaking from a very limited experience."
"From the experience of ten million years. I have only one life to live. Somehow I will make you love me, make you belong to me. Just because I eat with a fork, do you think my heart is really any different from that of the cave-man from whom it descended to me, or that your heart is any different from that of the girl he wanted, who kept him guessing and guessing until he couldn't stand it, and then turned and ran and ran through the woods, and swam rivers and climbed trees and jumped down precipices until he caught her?"
There was something in Wilmot's lowered brows, a certain jerking, broken quality in his utterance, that was new to Barbara--that at once frightened her a little, and caused her heart to beat with a sort of wild triumph. But she did not guess that the old cave-man was at that moment actually looking out through her old friend's eye-places, and that ten thousand years of civilization are but a thin varnish over the rough and splendid masterpiece that God made in his image.
There was a knock at the door. It was Scupper returning. He had left his beloved pipe (on purpose). His shrewd, bloodshot little eyes took in the situation at a glance. In two beats his little heart was wild with jealousy.
"I beg everybody's pardon," he said. "I didn't know, I--er--wouldn't have knocked--I--er--mean I would have knocked just the same."