The exigencies of the path along the summit of the mound forced Christian to walk behind her. In the voice which carried these words backward to him the quavering stress of profound emotion was more to him than the words themselves. He put out his hand and laid it lightly upon her arm.
“It is because you feel in your heart of hearts that I love you,” he said in a low, tremulous voice. “Can you not see? It is that that has made all our meetings disturbed, full of misunderstandings as well as pleasure. You wrong me, dear—or no, you could not do that, but it is that you do not comprehend. I have loved you from that first day. Oh, I have loved you always, since I can remember—long years before I saw you. There is not any memory in my life, it seems, but of you—for all the sweet things were a foretaste of you, and all the bitter are forgotten because of you. And shall there not be an end now to our hurting each other? For where you go I follow you, and I must always be longing for you—and I do not believe that in your heart you hold yourself away from me, but only in your mind.”
She had drawn her sleeve from his touch, and irresolutely quickened her steps. She perforce paused now at a broken gap in the bank, and with books and gathered skirts in one hand, lifted the other in instinctively balancing preparation for a descent. He took this hand, and she made no demur to his leading her down the steep slope to the level outer ground. He retained the hand reverently, gently in his own as they walked in silence across the heath. It seemed ever as if she would take it from him, and that he consciously exerted a magic through his touch which just sufficed to hold it.
With a bowed head, and cheek at once flushed and white, she began to speak. “You are very young,” she said, lingering over the words with almost dejection in her tone. “You know so little of what life is like! You have such a place in the affairs of men to fill, and you come to it with such innocent boyish good faith—and men are so little like what you think they are. And as you learn the lesson—the hardening, disillusionizing lesson of the world—and the soft, youthful places in your nature toughen, and you are a man holding your own with other men, and lording it over them where you can, then you will hate the things which hamper you, and you will curse encumbrances that you took on you in your ignorance. And you are all wrong about me! It is because you do not know other women that you think well of me. I am a very ordinary girl, indeed. There are thousands like me, and better than me, with more courage and finer characters, and you do not know them, that is all. And there are the young women of your own little world, who are born and reared to be the wives of men in your place, and you will see them——”
“I have seen them,” he interposed softly. “But it is not fair!” she hurried on breathlessly. “It is the duty of a friend to hold a man back when he is bent on a folly. And we pledged ourselves to be true friends, and I implore you—or no, I insist! I will not have it. It is too cruelly unfair to you—and—I am going now—no, not that way; in the other direction. We will say good-bye.”
He would not relinquish the hand she strove to drag away. All the calmness of confident mastery was in his hold upon this hand, and in the gravely sweet cadence of his voice. “I love you,” he said. “I shall love no one in my life, or in another life, but you. I will not live without you. I will not willingly spend a day in all my years away from you. You are truly my other half—the companion, the friend, the love, the wife, without whom nothing exists for me. I am not young as you say I am, and I shall never be old—for in this love there is no youth or age for either of us. Try to look backward now! Can you see a time when we did not love each other? And forward! Is it thinkable that we can be parted?” Slowly she lifted her head.
“Look at me!” she bade him in a voice he seemed never to have heard before.