Stepping backward, he stood a few paces from her, his arms crossed, the glow on his face suddenly transcended by the look with which a man might regard a crime he had committed.
"What is it?" she cried, wickedly curious. The maple tree over her was a golden flame and her feet were on a carpet of gold. All around them the earth was heaped with palm-like sumac shrubs, scarlet, crimson, purple—dyed as it were, with blood.
"What have I done?" He held out his hands as if they had been stained. "I have loved you, I have dared, without a thought, without a thought for you, to walk straight into all the—the—heaven of it."
Then he told her, in a word, that about himself which he thought she would despise; and she saw that he thought she heard it for the first time.
Lifting her eyebrows in pretty incredulity. "Not really?" she said.
"It is true," he cried with fierce emphasis.
At that she looked grave.
He had been trying to make her serious; but no sooner did he see her look of light and joy pass into a look of thought than he was filled with that sort of acute misery which differs from other sorrows as acute pain differs from duller aches.
"My darling," he said, his heart was wrung with the words—"my darling, if I have hurt you, I have almost killed myself." (Man that he was, he believed that his life must ebb in this pain.)
"Why?" she asked. "How?"