"Nahnya, I've got to tell you how it made me feel," he went on in a low, moved voice. "I couldn't sleep without telling you. It made me mad with rage that things like that could happen to a woman like you. You ought to be the happiest woman in the world! And—and there's something else. I wish I could say it right. You don't know how fine you are, Nahnya. It is you who are wonderful. I never knew anybody like you. When I think of myself, what I have been, I feel as if I should go down on my knees to you. I suppose every man is born with a dream in his heart of a woman like you, brave and good and true like you, but few men meet her!"
This was infinitely worse to her than the silence. "Don't talk! Don't talk!" she murmured in a voice sharp with apprehension. "It hurts me!"
Ralph's bursting heart having found an outlet was not to be stopped. "I love you!" he said.
A queer little cry escaped her. She instinctively drove her paddle into the water, but Ralph clung to her canoe. She dropped the paddle, and covered her face with her hands.
Ralph, misinterpreting the cry, was wounded to the quick. "It's not the same," he cried. "I am different from those others. I love you truly. With the best there is in me. This is for life, Nahnya."
"Me, a red girl," she murmured. "You are crazy!"
"I don't care about that," he said quickly. "You're the woman I have dreamed of all my life!"
Her hands came down from her face, and gripped the sides of the canoe. Ralph quickly covered one of them with his own. She snatched her hand away. "Stop! Stop!" she murmured. "This is madness! You and I! What good could come of it!"
"Come of it?" said Ralph. "I'm asking you to marry me."
"Marry!" she whispered, with a piteous catch in her breath. Her hands were twisted together in a way that he knew. "Let me go!" she said imploringly. "Please, please let me go!"