"Great Heavens! Think; think before you take this terrible step. Are you sure it is love you feel, not admiration?"
"No, it is love. At first I thought it was admiration, and probably it was, for I was not likely to be mistaken in the analysis of my feelings, in which I have had much practice. But gradually I felt it efflorescing and sending forth tender shoots clad in delicate green buds, and a sweet wonder came upon me, and I knew that love was struggling to get itself born in my soul. Then suddenly the news came that he I loved was ill, dying in that lonely snow-hut in grim Greenland, and then in the tempest of grief that shook me I knew that my life was bound up with his. Watered by my hot tears, the love in my heart bourgeoned and blossomed like some strange tropical passion-flower, and when the reassuring message that he was strong and well flashed through the world, I felt that if he lived not for me, the universe were a blank and next year's daisies would grow over my early grave."
"He I loved was dying in Greenland."
She burst into tears. "A great writer has always been the ideal which I would not tell you of. It is the one thing I have kept from you. But oh, Frank, Frank, he can never be mine. He will probably never know of my existence and the most I can ever hope for is his autograph. To-morrow I shall join the Old Maids' Club, and then all will be over." A paroxysm of hopeless sobs punctuated her remarks.
It was a terrible position. Frank groaned inwardly.
How was he to explain to this fair young thing that she loved nobody and could never hope to marry him? There was no doubt that with her intense nature and her dreamy blue eyes she would pine away and die. Or worse, she would live to be an old maid.
He made an effort to laugh it off.
"Tush!" he said, "all this is mere imagination. I don't believe you really love anybody!"
"Frank!" She drew herself up, stony and rigid, the warm tears on her poor white face frozen to ice. "Have you nothing better than this to say to me, after I have shown you my inmost soul?"