He put his hand on hers, clenched before her. "You are thinking how unlike I am to anything you ever dreamed of me. I am! I do not know myself! Think if you can—five years of shame, and now freedom and the world—and you! You are not shocked, Frances, that I am glad?"
There was no answer, except the breath of the wind over the fields, and the rustling in the wayside bushes about them.
"Is it a dreadful thing to you that I should be glad?" he pleaded.
"No! Oh no!" Her trembling lips scarcely framed the words.
"Frances! Look at me!" he put his hand on her shoulder and felt the convulsive sob that shook her. "Sweetheart, my darling," he began, with broken words of love.
"No, no," cried the girl wildly, "you must not speak such words to me! Wait! wait a moment."
By and by she lifted her head, looked long over the fields which lay, the shimmer of heat pulsing over their greenness, and then she turned, courage and decision in her dark eyes, though the tears still clung to her long lashes.
"You have shown me your heart, and I—I am not the one to look into its secrets. It's spring-tide there," she hastened on with poetic simile—did she not keep to some such fashion she could not speak—"and there are blue skies, and bird songs and flowers—"
"The rose of love," said Lawson softly.
Frances drew her breath sobbingly, "'Tis not the time of roses," she said. "It is youth, and life, and ambition—"