"Let us say I don't worry so much about being unhappy. I suppose it amounts to the same thing." She sighed—and smiled. "Would you do this leaf green, or yellow?"
"I shouldn't do it at all," he said. "Put it down and talk to me. I remember once when you were telling me your troubles, you cried. It was one afternoon on the terrace; you had on a pale blue frock, and a big floppy hat. I'd have given my life to kiss you at that moment."
"You mustn't say these things to me," she faltered. She said it more gravely than on the Plage; she was not smiling now, and she lowered her eyes—he knew that he might seize her hands.
"I've waited for you so long," he exclaimed. "Joan, be kind to me!"
But his heart did not thud in her silence. He held her hands fast; the doyley she was making had fallen to the couch.
At last she murmured, still looking down, "How can you care for me? We've only just met."
"I've cared for you ever since. If you knew how I worshipped you—if you knew what I suffered when you were vexed with me! That night you sat talking to those men, and the next morning when you were offended—I remember what I felt as if it were a month ago. I remember what you said as you turned away, and how I sat watching, praying that you'd come back. And then I waited at the door, and begged your pardon, and you wouldn't forgive me. I've relived it all so often. I did love you, darling, I did, I did! ... It sounds idiotic: there was a song of yours, 'To-day, to-day our dream is over—To-day the waking cold and grey'; I learnt to strum the refrain there to—to make me feel nearer to you when I had gone. Since I've been a man I've strummed that refrain a hundred times, and longed for you—I was strumming it years after you had forgotten you ever sang it. I've thought about you sometimes till my boyhood has been alive in me, trembling. If Faust's chance could have come to me in any year since we parted, I'd have said 'Let me be seventeen again in Rouen.'"
"The past is always beautiful. I made you very wretched, though."
"But you liked me a little. Heaven knows why I—I was a fool. Still you did."
"Perhaps it was because you were a 'fool' that I was foolish. That's all over." She drew her hands from his clasp.