"Do you mean that?" he said eagerly. "Say it--do you mean that you love me?"
"Love you?" She stood up, pressing both hands over her heart as if there were real pain there. For a few paces she walked away from him, and, as he followed her, she turned upon him the extraordinary beauty of her face transfigured with strong emotion.
"Greg," she said quietly, "I didn't know there was such love! I've heard it called fire and pain and restlessness, but this thing is ME! It is burning in me like flame, it is consuming me. To be with you"--she caught his wrist with one hand, and with her free hand pointed out across the smiling ocean--"to be with you and KNOW you were mine, I could walk straight out into that water, and end it all, and be glad--glad--glad of the chance! I loved you yesterday, but what is this to-day, when you have kissed me, and held me in your arms!" Her voice broke on something like a sob, but her eyes were smiling. "All my life I've been asleep," said Rachael. "I'm awake now--I'm awake now! I begin to realize how helpless one is--to realize what I should have done if you hadn't come--"
"My darling," Gregory said, his arms about her "what else--feeling as we feel--could I have done?"
Held in his embrace, she rested her hands upon his shoulders, and looked wistfully into his eyes.
"It is as WE feel, isn't it?" she said. "I mean, it isn't only me? You--you love me?"
Looking down at her dropped, velvety lashes, feeling the warm strong beat of her heart against his, holding close as he did all her glowing and fragrant beauty, Warren Gregory felt it the most exquisite moment of his life. Her youth, her history, her wonderful poise and sureness so intoxicatingly linked with all a girl's unexpected shyness and adorable uncertainties, all these combined to enthrall the man who had admired her for many years and loved her for more than one.
"Love you?" he asked, claiming again the lips she yielded with such a delicious widening of her eyes and quickening of breath.
"You see, Warren," she said presently, "I'm not a girl. I give myself to you with a knowledge and a joy no girl could possibly have. I don't want to coquette and delay. I want to be your wife, and to learn your faults, and have you learn mine, and settle down into harness--one year, five years--ten years married! Oh, you don't know how I LONG to be ten years married. I shan't mind a bit being nearly forty. Forty--doesn't it sound SETTLED, and sedate--and that's what I want. I--I shall love getting gray, and feeling that you and I don't care so much about going places, don't you know? We'll like better just being home together, won't we? We're older than most people now, aren't we?"
He laughed aloud at the bright face so enchantingly young in its restored beauty. He had expected to find her charming, but in this new phase of girlishness, of happiness, she was a thousand times more charming than he had dreamed. It was hard to believe that this eager girl in a striped blue and yellow and purple skirt, and rough white crash hat, was the bored, the remote, the much-feared Mrs. Clarence Breckenridge. Something free and sweet and virginal had come back to her, or been born in her. She was like no phase of the many phases in which he had known her; she was a Rachael who had never known the sordid, the disillusioning side of life. Even her seriousness had the confident, eager quality of youth, and her gayety was as pure as a child's. She had cast off the old sophistication, the old recklessness of speech; she was not even interested in the old associates. The world for her was all in him and their love for each other, and she walked back to Quaker Bridge, at his side, too wholly swept away from all self-consciousness to know or to care that they were at once the target for all eyes.