For a long time she stood thus, wrapped in her thoughts, forgetting everything around her. Then suddenly as if she heard the silence in the room and the long-drawn singing of the gas-flames, she let her hand drop from the vase and sat down by the table and began to turn over the leaves of a portfolio.
She heard steps, passing by the door, heard them turn back, and saw Thorbrogger enter.
They exchanged a few words but as she seemed occupied with the pictures, he also began to look at the magazines that lay in front of him. They, however, did not interest him very much for when a little later she looked up, she met his eyes which rested searchingly upon her.
He looked as if he were just about to speak, and there was a nervous, decided expression round his mouth, which told her so definitely what his words would be that she reddened.
Instinctively, as if she wished to hold back these words, she held out a picture across the table and pointed at some horsemen from the pampas, who were throwing lassoes over wild steers.
He was just about to make some jesting remark about the draftsman’s naive conception of the art of throwing a lasso. It was so enticingly easy to speak of this rather than of that which he had on his mind. Resolutely, however, he pushed the picture aside, leaned a little ways across the table and said,
“I have thought a great deal about you since we met again; I have always thought a great deal about you, both long ago in Denmark and over where I was. And I have always loved you, and if it sometimes seems to me that it is only now that I really love you since we have met again, it is not true, however great my love may be, for I have always loved you, I have always loved you. And if it should happen now that you would become mine—you cannot imagine what that would mean to me, if you, who were taken from me for so many years, were to come back.”
He was silent for a moment, then he rose, and came closer to her.
“Oh, do say a word! I am standing here talking blindly. I speak to you as to an interpreter, a stranger, who has to repeat what I am saying to the heart I am speaking to.. I don’t know... to stand here and weigh my words... I don’t know, how far or how near. I dare not put into words the adoration which fills me—or dare I?”
He let himself sink down on a chair by her side.