I shook my head. “Care for you!” I repeated. “I cared for you so much that I did not dare trust myself with you. I did not dare to think of you, and yet I could think of no one else. I know now that I fell in love with you when I first met you at that horrible Briggs woman's lodging-house. Don't you see? That was the very reason why. Don't you see?”
“No, I'm afraid I don't quite see. If you cared for me like that how could you be willing for me to marry him? That is what puzzles me. I don't understand it.”
“It was because I did care for you. It was because I cared so much, I wanted you to be happy. I never dreamed that you could care for an old, staid, broken-down bookworm like me. It wasn't thinkable. I can scarcely think it now. Oh, Frances, are you SURE you are not making a mistake? Are you sure it isn't gratitude which makes you—”
She rose from her chair and came to me. Her eyes were wet, but there was a light in them like the sunlight behind a summer shower.
“Don't, please don't!” she begged. “And caring for me like that you could still come to me as you did this morning and suggest my marrying him.”
“Yes, yes, I came because—because I knew he loved you and I thought that you might not know it. And if you did know it I thought—perhaps—you might be happier and—”
I faltered and stopped. She was standing beside me, looking up into my face.
“I did know it,” she said. “He told me, there in Paris. And I told him—”
“You told him—?”
“I told him that I liked him; I do, I do; he is a good man. But I told him—” she rose on tiptoe and kissed me—“I told him that I loved you, dear. See! here is the pin you gave me. It is the one thing I could not leave behind when I ran away from Mayberry. I meant to keep that always—and I always shall.”