She kissed his hand again. “Yes, I do! I am saying just as plainly as I can that I love you; that I belong to you, and that I ask for nothing else but to belong to you as long as I live.”
His hand made a motion of protest.
“I want you just as much as I did the day you first kissed me. I want the right to stay with you always and care for you.”
He winced visibly. “‘Care for me!’” he repeated. “It would be all care. I have nothing to bring you now but sorrow and regret. I’m not the Daunt who offered himself to you at Warne. I’m only a fragment. I had health and hopes then. I had beautiful dreams, Margaret—dreams of work and a home and you. I shan’t ever forget those dreams, but they can never come true!”
She smoothed his hand caressingly. “I have had dreams, too,” she answered. “This is the one that comes oftenest of all. It is about you and me.” She turned her head, with a spot of color in either cheek. “Sometimes it is in the day. You are lying, writing away at a new book of yours, and I am filling your pipe for you, while the tea is getting hot. I see you smile up to me and say, ‘Clever girl! how did you know I wanted a smoke?’ Then you read your last chapter to me, and I tell you how I wouldn’t have said it the way the woman in the story does, and you pretend you are going to change it, and don’t.
“Sometimes it is in the evening, and we are looking out at the sunset just as we have been doing to-night.”
He would have spoken, but she covered his mouth with her hand. His moist breath wrapped her palm.
“And then it is dark and there is a big red lamp on the table—the one I had in my old room—and I am reading the latest novel to you, and when we have got to the end, you are telling me how you would have done it.”
While she had been speaking, glowing and dark-eyed, a mystical peace—a divine forgetfulness had touched him. He lifted his hand to his forehead, feeling her soft fingers. The pictures she painted were so sweet!
Presently he threw his arm down with a swallowed sob. The dream-scene faded, and he lay once more helpless and despairing, weighted with the heaviness of useless limbs, a numb burden for whom there could be no love, no joy, nothing but the inevitable rebuke of enduring pain. He smoothed the wide dun-gold waves of her hair gently.