"Hilda," I said, "if there is no power of loving in me, but only of fancying, still you have said that fancy feeds on propinquity. I have no right to say that I love you; no right to promise that I ever will. It's not your sweet pretty face that's moving me now. It's your power of loving—your power of loving me—your constancy—your trust—your courage in saying that these things shall not go begging—if I say they shall not. What I thought another had, what I thought I had, only you have. I dare not make promises. I dare not boast. But caring the way you care, if you think you can make anything out of me—say so."
She thought for a while, her eyes lowered, her lips parted in a peaceful sort of smile. Then she said; "It'll be good to have heard all that."
"It'll be better to have tried," I said.
"Not if you don't want me at all."
"But I do."
"Well," she said, looking up now, and a valiant ring in her sweet English voice: "If I wanted to say no, I couldn't. If I thought I ought to say no, I wouldn't. But I don't think I ought to. I think when the Lord God put what's in my heart in it, he meant for there to be something for me at the end of torment. So I say yes. For I've knelt on cold floors and hot floors to pray God that some day I could give myself to the man I love."
"And that shall be when you are married to him.… Don't look so frightened … it's got to be like that. Give a man a chance to make good. Do you think I'm such a fool as to throw away the love you've got for me?… We'll try this nursing game together, but not at the front, where the bullets are. I want us to live and to have our chance, you yours and I mine—taken together. Don't you see that I am speaking with every ounce of sincerity there is in me? I couldn't take such love as yours and not make good. That's in my heart. I couldn't, I couldn't. Isn't it in my face, too—isn't it?"
She did not answer at first, only looked in my face, her eyes flooding.
Then she said: "I don't see your face any more—only a kind of glory."
We ran slowly back to the city, slowly, and very peacefully. Now and again we talked a little, and argued a little.