As they gazed, without speaking, the man was telling the woman that he loved her, and the woman was telling the man that she cared for him.
It came quite naturally, when he took her hand and held it.
“I have wanted to tell you for a long time,” he said.
She sighed, but she let him hold her hand.
Then she said, as if in answer to some question.
“It can never be.”
“I love you,” he said, speaking in a plain, matter-of-fact tone, that would have told little to a stander-by of the passion that was consuming him. “You have come into my life suddenly, and if I lose you, if you leave me, I will be for ever desolate—dear friend.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“It can never be.”
There was a fatality, a hopelessness in her voice, that told him that these words were no idle woman’s words. It could never be. Never could he hold her in his arms as his own, never possess her. Paradise lay before him, yet he could never enter in.