"I cannot pretend to misunderstand you, Kitty," he said then; "I do know what you mean. You ought not to have spoken. No girl should put a man in such a position."
"A man thinks nothing of putting a girl in such a position," she retorted, with spirit.
"I have not done so." He longed to say something more, but checked himself. "Yes, you have made a mistake," he said. Then, endeavouring to calm his voice, "And a man cannot take his wife into the battlefield. War is inevitable. This is no time to think of—"
"You don't love me—that is what you mean," said Kitty.
He hated to give her pain. Perhaps he was weak enough to have said words just then which he might have regretted all his days, but just at that moment a vision of Mollie, as she had looked when he spoke to her before dinner, returned to him.
"It is true that I do not love you in that sort of fashion, Kitty," he said then. "I am fond of you, my dear; but you must know, you must guess, that there is a difference."
"Oh, so wide!" she cried. She stretched out both her arms. "There is a love which fills the heart, which covers the horizon, which colours every single thing one does; and there is also what people call an ordinary friendship or attachment. How dare people speak of the two in the same breath? You, Gavon, give me an ordinary friendship. In return for my pretty speeches, and my songs, and my gaiety, and my fun, you give me an ordinary friendship. And I give you—oh, just everything!" Kitty spread her arms wide. Her face was pale, the tears had partly dried on her cheeks, and her eyes looked larger and more full of soul than he had ever seen them before.
"I am not worthy of it, Kitty," said the young man, and he bowed his head.
She looked at him as he did so, and then one of her queer impulses came over her. He was shocked and yet touched by her words; she would undo everything by her next confession.
"Before dinner," she said, "I was mad with jealousy. You wanted to see Molly—Molly whom you have not known twenty-four hours. I felt that I could not bear it. I came in here, and I overheard—"