She thought a moment. “Then you positively like me to stay?”
“Don’t I treat you as if I did?”
“You’re certainly very kind to me. But that,” said Maria, “is for myself. It’s getting late, as you see, and Paris turning rather hot and dusty. People are scattering, and some of them, in other places want me. But if you want me here—!”
She had spoken as resigned to his word, but he had of a sudden a still sharper sense than he would have expected of desiring not to lose her. “I want you here.”
She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they brought her, gave her something that was the compensation of her case. “Thank you,” she simply answered. And then as he looked at her a little harder, “Thank you very much,” she repeated.
It had broken as with a slight arrest into the current of their talk, and it held him a moment longer. “Why, two months, or whatever the time was, ago, did you so suddenly dash off? The reason you afterwards gave me for having kept away three weeks wasn’t the real one.”
She recalled. “I never supposed you believed it was. Yet,” she continued, “if you didn’t guess it that was just what helped you.”
He looked away from her on this; he indulged, so far as space permitted, in one of his slow absences. “I’ve often thought of it, but never to feel that I could guess it. And you see the consideration with which I’ve treated you in never asking till now.”
“Now then why do you ask?”
“To show you how I miss you when you’re not here, and what it does for me.”