"My poor Maurice," she said, in the same caressing way. "Yes, I shall always call you poor.—For the love I could give you would be worthless compared with yours."
"To me it would be everything.—If you only knew how I have longed for you, and how I have struggled!"
He took enough of her dress to bury his face in. She sat back, and looked over him into the growing dusk of the room: and, in the alabaster of her face, nothing seemed to live except her black eyes, with the half-rings of shadow.
Suddenly, with the unexpectedness that marked her movements when she was very intent, she leant forward again, and, with her elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand, said in a low voice: "Is it for ever?"
"For ever and ever."
"Say it's for ever." She still looked past him, but her lips had parted, and her face wore the expression of a child's listening to fairy-tales. At her own words, a vista seemed to open up before her, and, at the other end, in blue haze, shone the great good that had hitherto eluded her.
"I shall always love you," said the young man. "Nothing can make any difference."
"For ever," she repeated. "They are pretty words."
Then her expression changed; she took his head between her hands.
"Maurice ... I'm older than you, and I know better than you, what all this means. Believe me, I'm not worth your love. I'm only the shadow of my old self. And you are still so young and so ... so untried. There's still time to turn back, and be wise."