“But others—some one must have told you—of love. Do you know what love means?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
And now she looked at him. Her eyes were dark, her face deadly pale; her lips were so red that in the whiteness they seemed the only trace of colour.
“How do I know? Why because—nothing else matters. It seems like I’ve been coming all my life to it—and now it just says: ‘Here I am, Nella-Rose—here’!”
“I, too, have been coming to it all my life, little girl. I did not know—I was driven. I rebelled, because I did not know; but nothing else does matter, when—love gets you!”
“No. Nothing matters.” The girl’s voice was rapt and dreamy. Truedale put his hands across the space dividing them and took hold of hers.
“You will be—mine, Nella-Rose?”
“Seems like I must be!”
“Yes. Doesn’t it? Do you—you must understand, dear? I mean to live the rest of my life here in the hills—your hills. You once said one was of the hills or one wasn’t; will they let me stay?”