“I see.” She was so radiant, she was so wonderful! If he should be some utter good-for-naught, David thought——
“Then I did not see him, except occasionally,” Gabrielle resumed. “And when I did not see him, then I knew that logically, actually, he was everything I could love; a gentleman, kind, wise, admirable in every way.”
“Rich?” David asked, in a silence, and with a faint frown.
“No. Not—exactly poor, either.”
“But does he know that you are rich, Gabrielle?”
“I don’t think it makes any difference to him,” the girl said, thoughtfully, after a moment.
“I don’t suppose, of course, that it would!” David agreed, immediately.
“No. So that when I was away from him, I had time to think it out logically and dispassionately, and I knew he was—the one,” the girl resumed, “and when I saw him—whenever we were together, although I couldn’t think logically, or indeed think at all,” she said, laughing, and flushed, and meeting his eyes with a sort of defiant courage, “I knew, from the way I felt, that there never could be, and never would be, any one else!”
“I see, of course,” David said, slowly.
“Both ways,” Gabrielle went on, smiling a little anxiously, “I feel safe. When I’m not with him I can reason about it, I can look forward to all the years, thinking of myself as older, as the mother of children,” the girl went on seriously, her voice lowered to the essence of itself, her eyes upon the softly heaving and shining sea, “thinking of the books, the tramps, the friendships we will share. There is no moment of life that he will not make wonderful to me, poverty, change, sorrow, travel—everything,” she finished, looking up smiling, yet with the glitter of tears in her beautiful eyes.