"I told her," he answered bluntly, at last, "that I was in love with you and wanted to marry you."
"And she——?" Caroline did not respond any more than that; incredibly, to him, she was still thinking about Laura—— And he stood looking at her with the same odd mixture of curiosity and desire which had all along marked his pursuit of her, though beneath it there was now something deeper, more human, more permanent. He wanted to know—— But even when he did know, she would be his—his to take care of and fight for and help up in the world.
At last he gave the answer she was waiting for. "Laura took it quite differently from what I expected," he said. "She was awfully decent about it. I think she was relieved, in a way, to find she had not got me on her mind. She must have been afraid I should be very unhappy, of course. She would always be so sorry about anything like that, that I wonder she had the heart to throw me over, even though she didn't want me."
Caroline said nothing. Oddly enough, though she had not heard the sound of the waves before, the melancholy swish! swish! now echoed through her very soul. When she felt a salt taste on her lips she thought it was a drop of spray from the sea, then she felt the faint trickling sensation of another and another running down her cheeks.
"Caroline!" he said, putting his arm about her and bending his face to hers. "You're crying! What is it, little girl?"
She pulled herself away from him, sobbing out with a wild earnestness which he found incomprehensible: "No! No! You can't start yet. You have her kisses on your mouth yet."
"You didn't seem to mind that before," he said, suddenly white with anger. "I don't know why you should start to be jealous of Laura now everything is over."
"I'm not jealous," she said. "It is not that." Then she stopped short. He must believe what he liked, for she could not betray the secret of a girl whose love, she felt, was finer than her own.
"Well, you have no need to be jealous," he said. "She spoke nicely about you. She was awfully decent about it, and hoped you and she would be friends."
"Oh! I wish we could be," said Caroline, but deep down in her own consciousness she knew this would never happen; because it is not in human nature for a woman to cease being jealous of another who has done more than herself for the man she loves.