‘Well?’ he said.
‘Will you let me be perfectly frank with you?’ she said. ‘Are you sure about yourself in this?’
‘I am sure,’ he answered. ‘I love you, and I shall never love any other woman. Don’t think that I say that in the way in which I dare say it’s been said a million times—I mean it.’
‘Yes,’ she said; ‘I understand. You wouldn’t say anything that you didn’t mean. And I am going to be equally truthful with you. I don’t think it’s wrong of me to tell you that I have a feeling for you which I have not, and never had, for any other man that I have known. I could depend on you—I could go to you for help and advice, and I should rely on your strength. I have felt that since we met, as man and woman, a few weeks ago.’
‘Then——’ he began.
‘Stop a bit,’ she said, ‘let me finish. I want to be brutally plain-spoken—it’s really best to be so. I want you to know me as I am. I have loved Lucian Damerel ever since he and I were boy and girl. It is, perhaps, a curious love—you might say that there is very much more of a mother’s, or a sister’s, love in it than a wife’s. Well, I don’t know. I do know that it nearly broke my heart when I heard of his marriage to Haidee. I cannot tell—I have never been able to tell—in what exact way it was that I wanted him, but I did not want her to have him. Perhaps all that, or most of that, feeling has gone. I have tried hard, by working for others, to put all thought of another woman’s husband out of my mind. But the thought of Lucian is still there—it may, perhaps, always be there. While it is—even in the least, the very least degree—you understand, do you not?’ she said, with a sudden note of eager appeal breaking into her voice.
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I understand.’
She rose to her feet and held out her hand to him.
‘Then don’t let us try to put into words what we can feel much better,’ she said, smiling. ‘We are friends—always. And you are going away.’
The children found out that for some time at any rate there would be no more visits from the Lord. But the toys and the books, the fruit and flowers, came as regularly as ever, and the Lord was not forgotten.